The Met Breuer opened Marsden Hartley's Maine on March 15, 2017, as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's short-lived modern and contemporary program in Marcel Breuer's former Whitney building. The exhibition focused Hartley's career through the place he repeatedly claimed and reimagined: Maine, where his late paintings turned mountains, coastlines, fishermen, and regional identity into forceful modernist emblems. Rather than treating Hartley only as a cosmopolitan American modernist shaped by Europe, the show emphasized how local landscape, memory, and self-fashioning drove his mature work. Staged at the Met Breuer, it also exemplified the branch museum's attempt to connect modern art history to the Met's broader interpretive authority.
The exhibition sharpened Hartley's reputation as both a regional painter and a central American modernist.
