Sustained Comedy was painted by American Modernist painter, poet and essayist Mardsen Hartley. It is a figurative work belonging to the Expressionist movement. Hartley trained at the Cleveland School of Art before moving to New York and studying under William Merritt Chase, and at the National Academy of Design. By 1912, he had traveled to Europe. He spent time in Germany and met Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc- founders of Der Blaue Reiter group. Hartley became a central figure in the Stieglitz circle of early American modernists and drew on his knowledge of French avant-garde styles and German Expressionism to develop one of the more distinctive painting idioms of the period.
This painting was painted in 1939, and while at first, the work looks like a portrait of an anonymous young sailor, Hartley’s dealer Hudson Walker later confirmed it as a self-portrait, making it the only one Hartley ever painted. The figure wears a tank top and is marked with traditional sailor tattoos. A rose, a butterfly, a nude woman, a star, a heart pierced by an arrow, and a sailboat beneath clouds, painted as though genuinely inked into the skin. A window-like opening on the chest reveals a composite figure. Jonathan Weinberg reads it as a man holding a globe above the crucified Christ, while Bruce Robertson and Plesch see an echo of Leonardo's Vitruvian Man instead. Red pigment circles the sitter's eyes, resembling war paint or a ceremonial mask, and arrows pierce both eyes. Scholars connect this to Saint Sebastian, long read in art history as an unofficial symbol of gay desire. In fact, Hartley's homosexuality was a lasting source of personal tension. It shaped the body of coded, emblem-heavy portraiture that scholars now read Sustained Comedy as part of. In the painting, one can also see a lightning bolt striking a white triangle on the forehead and butterflies hovering near one ear. Hartley also placed a bird's nest with a mother and two chicks on one shoulder and rooted flowers on the other, animating the tattoos beyond simple decoration. The painting belongs to Hartley's late "Maine period," after his 1937 return to his home state. Historians read the youthful, muscular sailor as a compensatory ideal, since Hartley was 62, frail, and once described by critic Paul Rosenfeld as "the gaunt eagle from the hills of Maine."
Marsden Hartley’s Sustained Comedy (1939) is an unusual symbolic self-portrait in which the human body becomes a surface for expressing identity and emotion. The frontal figure wears a sleeveless shirt and is surrounded and covered by striking symbols. Butterflies, flowers, a bird and nest, a sailing ship, starfish and tattoos appear alongside more disturbing imagery, including arrows piercing the eyes, a wounded heart and a thunderbolt striking the forehead. A religious image combining the crucified Christ with Atlas appears prominently on the figure’s shirt.
Rather than creating a realistic physical likeness, Hartley constructs a psychological and symbolic portrait. Images of injury and religious suffering suggest pain, sacrifice and vulnerability, while butterflies, flowers and birds introduce ideas of beauty, nature and transformation. The simultaneous presence of playful and painful imagery helps explain the title Sustained Comedy: human identity is presented as a complicated mixture of suffering, humour, desire and endurance. The painting can therefore be understood as Hartley’s highly personal exploration of himself, using symbols rather than conventional portraiture to communicate different aspects of his inner and artistic life.
