Vincent Hartgen, Maine Artist, Featured in New Book on his Art, Legacy

Contact: Carl Little at little@prexar.com, 207-667-9735
Stephen Hartgen at Stephen_Hartgen@hotmail.com. or 208-420-6761.

Orono, Maine, Feb. 21, 2008 ‘ Vincent Hartgen, the prolific Maine artist who founded the University of Maine Art Department, the University of Maine Museum of Art, and advanced arts in the state through a lifetime of promotion and creative works of his own, is the subject of a new biography and art monograph by Maine arts essayist, Carl Little, and the artist’s sons, David and Stephen Hartgen.  

Vincent Andrew Hartgen: His Art and Legacy is scheduled for printing in March by The Caxton Printers, Ltd., Caldwell, Idaho, for the private imprint publisher, Wildflower Lane Publishing. The book will be available over the internet, through Maine commercial bookstores, and at the University of Maine Bookstore, Orono.

The volume is the first book-length treatment of Hartgen and his art. It includes nearly 50 color plates of Hartgen’s much-appreciated watercolors of landscapes and seascapes of the Maine coast, woods and fields, and more than 40 drawings by the artist. The works were chosen from private collections as well as from the UMMA’s holdings of Hartgen’s works, the Vincent Hartgen Teaching Collection at the University of Maine Art Department and nearly 20 public and museum collections from across the nation, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

Hartgen died in 2002 at age 88. He was a prolific artist who produced an estimated 2,000 signed paintings and drawings in his long career and an equal number of sketches and demonstrations. His works are held in many Maine collections, including Colby College, Farnsworth Museum, Portland Museum of Art and the University of New England. The book contains an extensive “Known Works Inventory” of the artist’s works, allowing owners of Hartgen art to trace the provenances of their holdings.

Carl Little is the author of more than a dozen books on art, including books on Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Edward Hopper. He is frequent lecturer and contributor to magazines and newspapers on Maine and New England art. His extended essay in the book examines Hartgen as an important Maine painter, and the artists’s legacy of building the University’s art collections, and his renown as a dynamic lecturer who introduced thousands of University of Maine students to the world of fine arts. Little is public communications director at the Maine Community Foundation, Ellsworth. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College, and holds an MFA from Columbia University.

David Hartgen, Ph.D., is professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, N.C. He is a graduate of Duke University and holds a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in Civil Engineering. For the book on his father, he contributes the extended “Known Works Inventory” and a profile of the artist’s productivity and varying styles through his long career in Maine, from the 1940s to 2002.

Stephen Hartgen, Ph.D. is the book’s chief editor.  A retired newspaper publisher, he runs a public policy and media relations firm in Twin Falls, Idaho. He began his journalism career at the Bangor Daily News while attending Amherst College and is the co-author of a leading public affairs reporting textbook, New Strategies For Public Affairs Reporting (Prentice-Hall, 1984). He holds a Ph.D. in American History from the University of Minnesota.

Little’s essay draws extensively on the Hartgen archive collection at the Fogler Library, University of Maine, as well as from an extended bibliography of newspaper and magazine articles on the artist from the 1950s through 2007.  Premier examples of Hartgen’s collecting efforts at the UMMA were featured in 2007 at the museum’s Bangor center, as well as several paintings and drawings by Hartgen in the UMMA collection. The artist is honored with the “Vincent Hartgen Lecture Hall” at the University of Maine’s remodeled Lord Hall and with a number of his paintings on permanent display on the Orono campus.

Little concludes that “Vincent Har