Suffering for art is supposed to be noble. It isn't supposed to kill you. But it killed the painter Middleton Manigault at the relatively tender age of 35.

Manigault literally starved to death. In 1922, plagued by anxiety and depression, he began to fast, anticipating that deprivation would propel his mind to a higher plane of spirituality, where he would perceive new colors.

Alas, he diminished himself so much that he saw only black. Yet apparently the experience was worth the ultimate price. As his wife, Gertrude, wrote in a letter to relatives:

"He was filled with a sense of victory... a marvelous revelation of beauty and love, and that all need be done was to bring back strength into his wasted body."

Manigault's epiphany came too late. This is tragic, because the art he left behind speaks of a fierce and imaginative creative spirit.

His history suggests he was emotionally fragile. When he died, he might have been frustrated by his inability to locate what he considered to be his true voice.

A retrospective exhibition at the University of Delaware, the first for this fascinating but forgotten artist, suggests as much. Manigault is so obscure in American art that this show serves to introduce him to the public.

Comprising 50 paintings, objects and works on paper, it was organized by the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art in cooperation with Hollis Taggert Galleries, New York. The curator is Beth Venn, who wrote her master's thesis on Manigault at the university and who later worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The exhibition reveals that Manigault (MAN-ih-go) switched styles frequently in the roughly 17 years that he worked professionally.

He was equally adept in all, from the Ashcan realism he learned as a student of Robert Henri to the Cézannesque - that is, protocubist - landscapes he painted the year he died.

Manigault's eclecticism also includes a symbolist phase that produced some of his most forceful and memorable paintings, and a postimpressionist/fauve phase characterized by explosive color.

Each of these could be a mature style, yet apparently none satisfied Manigault sufficiently.

One wonders why he wasn't comfortable with a style for more than a few months. Temperament might not have allowed it. Also, his arrival in New York during the feverish early years of modern art might have been an equally significant factor.

Middleton Manigault was born in London, Ontario, in 1887, into a family with deep roots in Charleston, S.C. Several of his ancestors emigrated to Canada after the Civil War to escape Reconstruction.

Manigault displayed precocious talent even before leaving home for art school. At age 18, he was commissioned by the city of London to make pen-and-ink drawings of various public buildings. These were reproduced on postcards.

Shortly thereafter, in 1905, he enrolled at the New York School of Art, where he studied with Robert Henri, leader of the Ashcan realists, and another influential teacher of the period, Kenneth Hayes Miller.

Henri's influence is apparent in a 1907 painting of Herald Square in winter; it's a typical Ashcan, life-on-the-street subject. Around the same time, Manigault also made a few etchings, small and finely detailed in the manner of James McNeill Whistler.

From this early realist phase, further typified by the quiet interior called The Little Room, Manigault jumped feetfirst into early modernism - specifically, into a floridly chromatic style that appears to have been influenced by the European fauve movement and by postimpressionism.

A 1909 picture of fireworks at night called The Rocket (echoes of Whistler's The Falling Rocket), an intensely fauvish scene of buildings at the edge of Central Park (1910), and particularly a Biblical subject, Christ Appearing to Mary (also 1910) reveal a painter who has been energized by what was then the most advanced European thinking.

In 1911, Manigault toned down this somewhat brash language in two more Central Park pictures. The paintings of the park zoo and of a large gazebo and fountain reflect an art nouveau sensibility. In particular, Gazebo in Central Park shimmers iridescently like stained glass.

As accomplished as these works are, Manigault didn't linger over fauvism, a style that featured bold brushstrokes and vivid, straight-from-the-tube colors. In the 1911 painting A New England Town, a scene in Providence, R.I., he segued back to a stylized realism, in a subdued palette, that looks almost naive.

The artist traveled in England and France during the summer of 1912. After he returned, he moved abruptly from descriptive realism and the startling dissonances of fauvism into a moody, emotionally charged mix of symbolism and romanticism.

These paintings of women in mysterious landscapes are appealing but enigmatic. They tend to be dark and vaguely triste, like the melancholy clown in whiteface that Manigault exhibited at the landmark 1913 Armory show of modern art.

Six Women, Adagio, which depicts a chorus of six elegantly gowned women in a penumbral, swirling landscape, and the equally evocative The Source - six elongated nudes lounging around a stream in a luminous valley - reveal the full force of Manigault's symbolist imagination.

The Armory show represented the formal beachhead of modern art in America, and initially Manigault responded, in 1916, by experimenting with vorticism. This English movement combined the dynamism of futurism, developed in Italy, and the fragmented monumentality of cubism.

Two superb watercolors, Landscape With Bridge and Vorticist Landscape, indicate that he absorbed this avant-garde philosophy enthusiastically - for a few months, anyway.

Then he swerved dramatically again, but this time back in time to a languid realism that owes a lot to Renoir and, ultimately, to Cézanne.

For evidence for this final spasm, the exhibition offers a group of still lifes, among them the simple Aspidistera and two larger, more complex tabletop arrangements made in 1918.

The last paintings that Manigault made in the early 1920s slide toward the fracturing of planes innovated by Cézanne, but they also display the coppery greens favored by Renoir.

It's ironic that the show closes with an untitled landscape in which Manigault has returned to the origins of cubism, which emerged about the time he came to New York to study art.

Manigault was more than a painter; he was also supremely skilled with his hands. He designed architectural accompaniments such as a fireplace surround for his Los Angeles house.

He also painted ceramics and made handsome frames for his paintings. Several of the symbolist pictures in the show are fitted out with them.

These accomplishments make his relatively brief career seem all the more tragic. Tracing it through this exhibition allows us to experience the formative years of modernism, as he did.