Newark, Del. ? Visitors to an exhibition of the works of early 20th-century modernist Middleton Manigault might be forgiven if they leave scratching their heads and wondering what it was all about.

The exhibition is a retrospective of an obscure figure in American art, a tortured soul who showed promise and attained acclaim before starving himself to death at the age of 35 in search of artistic enlightenment.

But Manigault’s defining characteristic a restlessness manifested in mental illness and portrayed in endless experimentation presents a challenge in trying to understand the artist.

The exhibition of about 50 works offers a smorgasbord of all things modern: impressionism, postimpressionism, fauvism, cubism, synchronism, symbolism, abstract expressionism.

“We’re so used to having artists whose work follows a logical sequence … that it’s hard when you’re dealing with an artist like Manigault,” said Beth Venn, guest curator for “Middleton Manigault: Visionary Modernist,” which opened Sept. 5 at the University Gallery in Newark. “Manigault basically tasted and sampled a little bit of everything.”

The show, organized by the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio in partnership with Hollis Taggart Galleries of New York City, opened in January in Columbus before traveling to Hollis Taggart for the summer. It remains at the University of Delaware through Nov. 10 and will make a final stop at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, S.C., where it opens Nov. 22.

Exhibition principals

The principals behind the exhibition are Nannette Maciejunes, senior curator for the Columbus Museum, and Venn, New York-based curator for the Norton Family Foundation and Collection and former curator of the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Venn latched onto Manigault at the University of Delaware while searching for a topic for her master’s thesis. She wanted to do primary research about an artist not already well documented. Her adviser suggested Manigault.

She remembered Manigault as a participant in two seminal New York events the Exhibition of Independent Artists in 1910, which showcased many students of Robert Henri, and the International Exhibition of Modern Art of 1913, better known as the Armory Show.

Venn began a seven-year search for more information, finding a microfilmed copy of Manigault’s record book of creations and transactions in the Archives of American Art, and tracking down significant holdings of his works at the Columbus and Gibbes museums.

Interviews with relatives in South Carolina and family friends in Canada helped bring Manigault’s life into focus.

Born in Canada in 1887 to a family with roots in the Low Country aristocracy of South Carolina, Manigault was a teen-ager when he packed his bags for the New York School of Art to study under Henri and the man who eventually became his mentor, Kenneth Hayes Miller. His classmates included Edward Hopper.

Manigault’s early Ashcan-style paintings of urban street scenes, as well as a 1906 landscape, “Poplars at Dawn,” hinted at the moody atmospheres and dark, blue-green color schemes that dominated much of his later work.

But their realism and muted tones gave no warning of the explosion of color and texture in “The Rocket,” a signature work if such can be said of Manigault from 1909 that evokes both the fauvist style of Matisse and pays tribute to van Gogh and other postimpressionists.

No sooner does Manigault appear to settle on color contrasts and patterning then he switches gears and reverts to darker palettes and flat patterns for “A New England Town” and “Procession,” both from 1911.

Romantic landscapes

In 1912, Manigault began a series of symbolist-inspired romantic landscapes featuring ethereal nudes, perhaps inspired by Arthur B. Davies.

Then, it was off to Europe for four months to study old masters and dabble in watercolors. After returning to the United States, Manigault made a splash at the Armory Show with works such as “Six Women, Adagio,” which helped launch a peak period of critical and commercial success.

In the spring of 1915, Manigault volunteered as an ambulance driver for the British Expeditionary Force of World War I. He served five months before being discharged, apparently having suffered a nervous breakdown.

His return to the world of art came slowly and painfully, with the artist declaring at one point that “painting is worse than war.”

“Vorticist Landscape” (1916) is a cathartic abstraction in which Manigault appears to try to free himself from the horrors of war and the demons within him. However, he soon returned to more muted and figurative creations. For works such as “Tree Rhythm” (1918), Manigault diluted his oil colors and brushed them on so sparingly and wispily they appear almost as pastels.

In the final years of his life, he affiliated himself with the Oneida Community, a Christian commune in upstate New York, and complemented his painting with decorative arts and interior design.

As depression and anxiety continued to overwhelm him, Manigault left New York in 1919 for Los Angeles, where he counted oil magnate J. Paul Getty among his clients.

Still struggling, he left Los Angeles in June 1922, moved to San Francisco and burrowed into an ascetic lifestyle through which he hoped to find the spiritual and artistic truths that eluded him. By the end of August that year, he was dead.

Manigault’s biggest contribution came not from any adaptation of technique or material, but more in his imaginative approach to art, Venn said.

“He’s not important if you consider an important artist someone who has kind of stood the test of time through various generations of art historians and critics,” Venn said. “But I do think he is an important person in that he so perfectly captures the spirit of the time in which he was working.”