My Dear Stieglitz: Letters Between Marsden Hartley and Alfred Stieglitz, 1912-1915

A collection of previously unpublished correspondence between American artist Marsden Hartley and avant-garde impresario, editor, and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, My Dear Stieglitz chronicles Hartley's three-year-plus European pilgrimage before - and during the inception of - World War I. Beginning with Hartley's 1912 arrival in Paris, his letters to Stieglitz provide sweeping accounts of Gertrude Stein's salons, gossip from bohemian cafes of Montparnasse, and commentary on paintings by Picasso, Cezanne, and Matisse. He records encounters with Robert Delaunay, Paul Fort, Claude Debussy, Elie Nadelman, Eduard Steichen, and Charles Demuth, as well as other commanding figures as he navigates the thriving capital of modern art and world culture during the rise of Cubism and Futurism. Searching for artistic growth and inspiration, Hartley reports, with opinionated insight, on the European world of art in the age of dealers and gallery owners such as Ambroise Vollard, the Bernheim-Jeunes, and the Durand-Ruels.
From Germany in early 1913, Hartley writes vibrant letters about the Expressionist artists in Munich, Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, and their group Der Blaue Reiter. Hartley's missives are up-to-the-minute exposes on avant-garde trends in Germany and childlike lamentations on life in the bustling, modern city of Berlin. His glory in Germany turns solemn with the onset of World War I and the death in combat of his close friend, a German officer named Karl von Freyburg - a loss vividly depicted in Hartley's renowned war motif paintings.
Stieglitz's correspondence from New York gives an American point of view of the European art climate while chronicling the effect of the 1913 Armory Show on modernism in America. Stieglitz sends Hartley money for expenses, summarizes the exhibitions held at 291, his gallery for modern art and photography, and comments upon the war raging in Europe.
Closing in late 1915 with Hartley's return to an America filled with anti-German sentiment and to a New York City seasoned by the influx of modern art, My Dear Stieglitz provides an intimate perspective on modern art and the human condition during the tempestuous years of the early twentieth century.