Abstraction - Marsden Hartley

An early modernist oil painting by Marsden Hartley featuring bold geometric shapes and military-inspired motifs in a palette of red, blue, and yellow.

Marsden Hartley painted this work during his time in Berlin between 1913 and 1915. It belongs to a series associated with military symbols, personal loss, and urban life. The composition uses a collection of geometric shapes including circles, triangles, stripes, and curved segments. These forms overlap to create a sense of compressed space. The application of oil paint is thick and visible, which adds a physical texture to the surface. The colour scheme relies on a bold palette of red, yellow, blue, white, and black. These colours are contained within heavy outlines. The circular motifs resemble military cockades, targets, or buttons. The diagonal stripes suggest flags, uniform details, and heraldic patterns. Hartley moved away from representational subjects during this period to explore pure form and symbolic arrangements. He was influenced by the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter and the spiritual theories of Wassily Kandinsky. This painting avoids a traditional perspective. Instead, the elements are stacked vertically. The background is a pale ochre that provides a neutral base for the more intense colours in the foreground. Hartley used these abstract arrangements to express internal emotions rather than external reality. The work is a significant example of early American modernism and the artist's engagement with European avant-garde movements.