America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Forms Abstracted

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Please note: Floor 8 is no longer on view.

In 1913, the French avant-garde artist Francis Picabia proclaimed his admiration for New York: “You of New York should be quick to understand me and my fellow painters. Your New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought. You have passed through all the old schools, and are futurists in your word and deed and thought.” Yet if Picabia saw New York— and the United States more broadly—as the great embodiment of modernity, the development of modern art was not so straightforward in a country still bound by more traditional aesthetic norms.

The European avant garde jolted American artists who encountered it through reproductions and exhibitions in New York or through travel to Paris and beyond. Some artists sought to emulate its stylistic advances, while others adapted European Modernism to images of America’s fast-changing culture and surroundings. In several of the works on view in this chapter, we see artists doing just what Picabia predicted—bending Cubism and Futurism to meet their own needs, including the depiction of such quintessentially American subjects as baseball and the cocktail. Other artists responded more philosophically to modernism by breaking away from the description of recognizable subjects to invent new abstract forms.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Forms Abstracted, 1913

An animal sits at the center of an abstract artwork.
An animal sits at the center of an abstract artwork.

Marsden Hartley, Forms Abstracted, 1913. Oil on canvas, 39 1/2 × 31 3/4 in. (100.3 x 80.7 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Hudson D. Walker and exchange  52.37

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.

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