Month: February 2009

VISIBLE SILENCE: MARSDEN HARTLEY, PAINTER AND POET
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 12TH @ 7:15PM
***DIRECTOR IN ATTENDANCE***
THE CAPE ANN COMMUNITY CINEMA
(AT GLOUCESTER STAGE)
267 EAST MAIN STREET * EAST GLOUCESTER * 978/282-1988

This is the first documentary ever made about world-renowned painter Marsden Hartley. It was written, directed, and narrated by Michael Maglaras of 217 Films, who will be on hand to introduce the film and answer questions following the screening.

“Visible Silence” features 43 Hartley paintings and sketches as well as many photographs of Hartley — from early youth to his final years as “Maine’s Painter.” Drawing heavily from his poetical works, this documentary, a deeply personal statement by Maglaras, captures the essence of Hartley — long considered one of the fathers of American Modernism.

Hartley spent his life traveling the world in search of remote and forbidding landscapes. A critical period for Hartley was his stay in Gloucester in the 1930’s, where he painted his “Dogtown” series.

“The two periods in Hartley’s creative life, first in 1920 and then again in 1931 when he went to Gloucester and to Cape Ann to paint, left us some of the most wonderful and exciting work of Hartley’s career,” said Maglaras. “Hartley fell in love with the area around Gloucester, known as Dogtown, and from his humble boarding house at #1 Eastern Point Road, reported to friends that ‘… a sense of eeriness pervades all the place; the white ghosts of those huge boulders stand like sentinels guarding nothing but space.’”

An entire section of this film is devoted to an important early painting, “Carnival of Autumn,” which is in the permanent collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Art. Also featured is the late painting “Summer, Sea, Window, Red Curtain” from the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Mass.

In 2008, a Hartley painting sold for $6.31 million, setting an auction record at Christie’s for an American Modernist work, overtaking a record previously held by a work of Georgia O’Keeffe.

Check out Gail McCarthy’s great article from last Thursday’s GD Times.

Director Michael Maglaras will be on-hand to present the film and conduct a Q&A after the show, and will be joined by Mary Beth Bainbridge of the Peabody-Essex Museum.