“
“Apart from trips to Europe during the 1890s and 1900s, Hartmann spent the remainder of his life in the United States, gaining citizenship in 1883 and establishing a career, first in belles-lettres as a self-consciously ‘decadent’ dramatist and author in the 1890s, and then, rapidly, in art criticism. Composition in Portraiture and Landscape and Figure Composition, in 1909 and 1910 respectively.3 The period up to 1911 saw Hartmann at the height of his critical powers and influence, although often, and puzzlingly, he wrote on photography using the pseudonym Sidney Allan. After 1911, however, Hartmann withdrew from this role, at least partly as a consequence of a final falling out with Stieglitz after the founding of the Photo-Secession.4 Instead, he took on other parts to play, as the ‘King’ of bohemian Greenwich Village, as an anarchist fellowtraveller, and as the co-founder with Emma Goldman (among others) of the journal Mother Earth, as well as, finally, during a long decline an alcoholic and Hollywood hanger-on, and later still an isolated near-hermit living in a shack on the Morongo Indian Reservation near Banning, California.5 One of very few Japanese-Americans not to be interned during the 1939-45 war, Hartmann was nonetheless subjected to close scrutiny and even harassment by the FBI from the US entry into the war until his death aged 77 in 1944.6 Hartmann’s contemporary and posthumous reputations have not been well served by the unhelpful colouring conferred by this chequered history and his often-startling personal qualities. ‘A grotesque etched in flesh by the drunken Goya of Heaven’, said the critic Benjamin de Casseres of him in 1926.7 To the actor John Barrymore whose hard-drinking circle Hartmann joined during his Hollywood years, he appeared za living freak presumably sired by Mephistofeles out of Madame Butterfly’.8 Barrymore’s drinking crony, the writer Gene Fowler, whose 1954 memoir Minutes of the Last Meeting has largely been responsible for the persistent idea of Hartmann as an eccentric charlatan, repeatedly describes him as a physical and mental oddity, a mendacious alcoholic, a cadger and a thief.”
Exile and subjectivity: words and images in the writings of Sadakichi Hartmann, Corbett, David Peters. Journal of Art Historiography; Glasgow Iss. 29, (Dec 2023): 1-20.
Waiting For Charlemagne 