Sadakichi Hartmann

Sadakichi Hartmann photographed by Benjamin J. Falk around 1899

Carl Sadakichi Hartmann (* 8. November 1867 on Dejima , Nagasaki , Japan ; † 22. November 1944 in Saint Petersburg , Florida , USA ) was an American poet , essayist and art critic , playwright and actor German-Japanese descent. He was a prominent member of the Greenwich Village - Bohème of New York .

Life

Sadakichi Hartmann was born on the Dejima peninsula in the Bay of Nagasaki as the son of the German businessman Carl Herman Oskar Hartmann. His Japanese mother Osada Hartmann died at or shortly after his birth and Hartmann and his brother Taru were sent to Hamburg to live with their wealthy uncle Ernst Hartmann . Hartmann attended boarding school in Steinwerder . At the request of his father, who had returned to Germany, the fifteen-year-old was supposed to attend the naval academy in Kiel , but after three months he fled to Paris and was disinherited. He was sent to an uncle in Philadelphia in 1882 . There he worked as an unskilled worker in printing works and trained on the side. He attended the Mercantile Library and briefly went to the Spring Garden Institute. In 1884 he visited Walt Whitman , who lived in nearby Camden , and became a friend and secretary of the poet. After Whitman's death in 1892, Hartmann published controversial (alleged) conversations with the poet. Initially influenced by Whitman in his own poetry, he soon turned into a supporter of French symbolism . He had become acquainted with the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé in Europe, which he visited frequently in the late 1880s and early 1890s.

After attempting suicide, he married his nurse Elizabeth Blanche Walsh in 1891, who became a playwright under the pseudonym Elizabeth Breuil . They moved to Boston from New York's Greenwich Village , Hartmann founded his own magazine, The Art Critic , and he took American citizenship in 1894. The theater critic James Gibbons Huneker called his controversial piece of Christ "the boldest of all decadent productions." (1893) had Hartmann five children from his 1910 divorced, also a son of the poet Anne Throop and seven children with the artist Lillian Bohham , with who lived together from 1911 to 1916 in Elbert Hubbard's Roycroft artist colony in East Aurora , New York .

Sadakichi Hartmann as court magician in The Thief of Baghdad , 1924

Hartmann wrote a. a. about the theater for the Theater Magazine (1890), about Zola and about the concourts for The Boston Evening Transcript (1893). Art reviews appeared in Musical America , The Daily Tatler (1896), Criterion (1898), International Studio (1906-08). He also wrote for his own magazines The Art Critic (1893–94), Art News (1897), and The Stylus (1909–10). 350 sketches of New York life appeared in the New York State Newspaper (1898–1902).

As a photography critic he has written hundreds of works for various magazines, he wrote about Frank Eugene and Zaida Ben-Yusef, F. Holland Day , Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr., Gertrude Kasebier , Clarence Hudson White and Frederick I. Monsen for The Photographic Times , about Maude Wilson in Photo-Era and wrote under the pseudonym "Sidney Allan" numerous articles for Alfred Stieglitz 'magazine Camera Work on the development and history of photography .

Hartmann's view that Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer were the most important visual artists in America ( Musical America 1895) initially met with complete incomprehension. As an art critic, he wrote about the artists of the Ash Can School such as Robert Henri , Arthur B. Davies , George Luks , Maurice Predergast and other unknown and little respected artists such as Thomas Dewing , Albert Pinkham Ryder and Abbott Thayer . In 1911 he defended the painter Max Weber .

In 1903 Japanese Art appeared , which already contained a chapter on the reception of Japanese art in the West. Hartmann wrote early on about Japanese poetry and his anthology of haiku and tanka poems from 1915 was the first to be pioneered in English.

After the First World War , Hartmann no longer showed much interest in the fine arts. However, he continued to give popular photography lectures across the country. In 1916 he went to San Francisco , where he sought engagements. Returned to New York in 1919, he tried again on the West Coast in 1923 and went to Los Angeles . John Barrymore got him a role as court magician in the Douglas Fairbanks film The Thief of Baghdad in 1924 . Barrymore called Hartmann a "living freak ... conceived by Mephistopheles from Madame Butterfly ." In the same year, Hartmann, who was increasingly suffering from asthma , moved briefly to Beaumont , California , which is more climate-friendly for him . Hartmann moved from place to place, the alcoholic Hartmann spent the last years of his life with a daughter in Banning , California , on the border with the Morongo Indian reservation (from 1938), and devoted himself to pastel painting . Forgotten as an artist and writer, he was monitored by the FBI during World War II due to his Japanese origins.

Sadakichi Hartmann died on November 21, 1944 while visiting a daughter in Saint Petersburg , Florida. The enthusiastic letter writer left a considerable amount of correspondence that was only viewed years after his death.

Works (selection)

• 1893: Christ: A Dramatic Poem in Three Acts . Boston.
• 1895: Conversations with Walt Whitman . EP Coby, New York. As Sadakichi .
• 1896: A Tragedy in a New York Flat: A Dramatic Episode in Two Scenes . New York.
• 1897: Buddha: A Drama in Twelve Scenes . New York.
• 1899: Schopenhauer in the Air: Seven Stories . New York.
• 1900: Shakespeare in Art . LC Page, Boston.
• 1902: A History of American Art . 2 volumes. LC Page, Boston.
• 1903: Japanese Art . LC Page, Boston. ( at archive.org )
• 1904: Drifting Flowers of the Sea and Other Poems to Elizabeth Blanche Walsh . ( on Google books )
• 1908: Schopenhauer in the Air: Twelve Stories . Stylus Publ., Rochester, NY.
• 1909: Composition in Portraiture . EL Wilson, New York. As Sidney Allen
• 1910: Landscape and Figure Composition Baker & Taylor, New York ( on Google books )
• 1910: The Whistler Book. LC Page, Boston ( at archive.org )
• 1913: My Rubaiyat. Mangan Printing, St. Louis ( at archive.org )
• 1915: Permanent Peace: Is it a Dream?
• 1916: Tanka and Haikai: Japanese Rhythms. San Francisco. Rev. Edition 1920. Rev., as Japanese Rhythms , 1926. ( at archive.org )
• 1920: The Last Thirty Days of Christ . Private printing, New York ( on Google books )
• 1921: A Note on the Portraits of Walt Whitman . At the Sign of the Sparrow, New York.
• 1923: Confucius: A Drama in Two Acts . Private print, Los Angeles.
• 1927: Passport to Immortality . Beaumont, Cal.
• 1930: Seven Short Stories . Cloister Press, Beaumont, Cal.
• 1931: My Crucifiction: Asthma for 40 Years . Cloister Press of Hollywood, Tujunga, Cal.
• 1934: Moses: A Drama in Six Episodes.
• 1940: Strands and Ravelings of the Art Fabric . Author's Edition, Hollywood, Cal.
• 1971: George Knox, Harry W. Lewton (Eds.): White Chrisantheniums: Literary Fragments and Pronouncements . Herder & Herder, New York.
• 1976: George Knox, Harry W. Lawton (Eds.): The Whitman-Hartmann Controversy . Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main.
• 1978: Harry W. Lawton, George Knox (Eds.): The Valiant Knights of Daguerre: Selected Critical Essays on Photography and Profiles of Photographic Pioneers . University of California Press, Berkeley. ( on Google books )

Filmography

• 1924: The Thief of Baghdad ( The Thief of Bagdad )

literature

• S. Noma (Eds.): Hartmann, Carl Sadakichi . In: Japan. An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Kodansha, 1993. ISBN 4-06-205938-X , p. 504.
• Jane Weaver: Sadakichi Hartmann - Critical Modernist . University of California Press, Berkeley 1991, ISBN 0-520-06767-3 (English)

Web links

Commons : Sadakichi Hartmann  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Modern American Poetry: Sadakichi Hartmann , biography and bibliography (English)
• Guide to the Sadakichi Hartmann Papers , University of California, Riverside (English)
• Dictionary of Art Historians (English)
• Sadakichi Hartmann in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Sadakichi Hartmann in the database of Find a Grave (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} William Bryk: King of the Bohemians. The New York Sun, January 26, 2005, accessed April 17, 2010 .  The play was banned in Boston and nearly all editions were burned by the New England Watch and Ward Society . Hartmann was locked up.