ART NOTES

IN MAINE health, if not art, abounds. You can ask in any Massachusetts town if there are artists around, and you will be shown one across the street drawing the house on your side of the street—and another on your side painting the building across the road. But ask the same question Way Down East on the Maine coast, and you'll hear: “Artists? None as I know of.” At the post office they may say, “Seems like someone did say that lady there knitting on the Inn porch is a famous artist ...”

Reviewing this situation, I came by chance upon Marsden Hartley hiding in a lobster fisherman's severe little house overlooking a tiny bay—'way off the marked highways. Maine-born, the 60-year-old veteran of modern painting was sitting down to a dinner of bean soup and lobster, looking for all the world like a hardy fisherman.

I asked questions. He's "just setting," he says. Just reading, and writing verse. He's very busy trying not to paint; he wants to get New York out of his mind; New York is a great disappointment to him. This man who has had 27 one-man shows—one in Berlin, one in Munich, and 25 in New York—wants no more of New York.

He wants me to agree that he doesn't belong there but here, among simple people. None of these wind-tanned lobster fishermen, their big strong wives and exceptionally beautiful children knows of him as anything but a Maine boy come home. This is pleasant, and he'd like it to remain so. No letter ever comes to Marsden, because none of his friends and myriad acquaintances knows how to reach him, between today and next January or March, when he may go to the Southwest to teach.

"I've lived alone so much I'm never alone," he says. "We (sweeping an arm to include the 240 inhabitants of this remote lobster town) couldn't have New York people here! They just can't come this far!" —MAUDE RILEY.

Marsden Hartley, "somewhere in Maine", suns himself on the steps of his Summer retreat.

CUE, AUGUST 2, 1941