Bertram Hartman was an American modernist painter and illustrator, as well as a designer of batik and mosaics. He was born on April 18, 1882 in Junction City, Kansas. He was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago and later traveled to Europe to enroll in the Royal Academy in Munich in 1911 and then at the Royal Academy in Paris. He began his artistic career by painting scenes from the book “Robin Hood” on the walls of a hotel in his birth place of Junction City. He did illustrations for a publication known as The Judge, a magazine formed in 1881 by the artists James Albert Wales, Frank Tousey, and George H Jessop who had seceded from another magazine The Puck. He also did illustrations for The Dial, a transcendentalist magazine founded in 1840, and for various books such as Louis Untermeyer’s “Heavens”. When he returned from Europe Hartman traveled to Arizona where he painted brightly colored views of Canyon de Chelly that reflected his exposure to the early modernist works of Fauvism.
To support himself during the Depression Hartman worked for the WPA (Works Progress Administration) as well as for the FAP (Federal Arts Project) and under their auspices he painted six murals in Oneonta, New York for the Folks Tuberculosis Hospital as well as a mural for the United States Post Office in Dayton, Tennessee. He had a gift for cultivating friendships with luminaries such as John Marin, William and Marguerite Zorach, Marsden Hartley, Ernest Hemingway, Louis Untermeyer and others. From 1936 until 1937 he worked at the Annot Art School as an art teacher. Because of his financial hardships and ill health Hartman was unable to promote his work which went largely unnoticed or unknown during his lifetime as a result. Hartman died on July 9, 1960 in New York City where he had lived for many years and painted city views as well as polo scenes, landscapes, nude portraits, and floral still lifes.
