Marsden Hartley
Forms Abstracted
1914
Not on view
Date
1914
Classification
Paintings
Medium
Oil on canvas, with wood frame
Dimensions
Overall: 39 5/8 × 31 13/16in. (100.6 × 80.8 cm)
Accession number
52.37a-b
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Hudson D. Walker and exchange
Rights and reproductions
© artist or artist’s estate
In 1912, Marsden Hartley sailed for Europe, settling first in Paris and later in Berlin. The increasingly nationalist, militaristic atmosphere of the imperial German capital on the brink of war would soon inspire Hartley to turn to heraldic imagery as subject matter for his paintings. With its palette of black, red, and white and its flattened color planes with interlocking designs, Forms Abstracted begins to show this influence, anticipating the artist’s subsequent War Motif series. The composition also suggests the impact of Hartley’s encounters with the Munich-based Blaue Reiter artists Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. Painted the year of his visit to Kandinsky’s studio, Forms Abstracted recalls the Blaue Reiter artists’ preoccupation with animals and religious folk-art subjects. Here, Hartley embraces a spiritual theme, depicting the Lamb of God surrounded by radiating orbs, with a painted frame concept borrowed from folk art sources.
