"Considered the greatest of the early American modernists, the painter Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) traveled the United States and Europe in his search for a distinctive American aesthetic. His stay in New Mexico resulted in an extraordinary series of landscape paintings - created in New Mexico, New York, and Europe between 1918 and 1924 - that shows an evolution in style and thinking that is important for understanding both Hartley's oeuvre and American modernism in the postwar years." "In Marsden Hartley and the West, Heather Hole examines this pivotal stage of the painter's career, drawing upon his writings and considering his involvement with the Stieglitz circle and its "soil-and-spirit" philosophy, the Taos art colony, New York Dada, as well as weighing the impact of such historical events as World War I. Within this setting the author analyzes the pastels and oil paintings - many of them rarely seen and previously unpublished - that suggest Hartleys increasingly ambivalent response to the land. Beginning with optimistic, naturalistic views, the New Mexico works grew darker and more tumultuous, increasingly reflecting a sense of loss brought on by war. The paintings become a site where the landscapes of memory, self, and nation merge while reflecting broader modernist debates about Americanness and a usable past."--Jacket.