Image source: artvee.com
Introduction
Marsden Hartley’s “Raptus” (1913) is a centrifugal burst of circles, triangles and radiant bands that seems to spin even while it anchors itself to the canvas. Painted in Berlin at the very moment Hartley was forging his most daring symbolic language, the work stages a drama of seizure and elevation—what the Latin word raptus signals: to be snatched up, carried away, transported. The painting’s whirring wheel, prismatic spokes and insistent vertical spear embody that violent lift. If earlier American modernists flirted with abstraction, Hartley hurls himself into it here, welding personal mysticism, European avant‑garde structure, and the spectacle of militaristic Berlin into a single, blazing emblem.
Berlin 1913: A Furnace of Symbols and Spectacle
Hartley arrived in Berlin enthralled by parades, regimental banners, Wagnerian opera, and the synesthetic theories circulating among Kandinsky’s circle. “Raptus” bears the imprint of that furnace. Rather than paint a marching soldier or a cathedral interior, Hartley abstracts their emotional residue: the thud of drums becomes concentric rings, the glint of medals turns to golden segments, the upward sweep of hymn or fanfare transforms into a white lance piercing the composition. Berlin’s electricity gave Hartley permission to compress lived sensation into a heraldic code, and the numberless title—no anecdotal subtitle, only a Latin noun—declares his ambition to transcend anecdote in favor of universal charge.
The Word Itself: Decoding “Raptus”
Placed squarely in crimson capitals beneath the spinning disc, the word RAPTUS is not decorative—it is the painting’s verbal fuse. Etymologically it conjures rapture, rape, ravishment, spiritual ecstasy and violent abduction. Hartley courts that ambiguity. The picture balances ecstasy and aggression, devotion and rupture. We read the word, then feel the visual equivalent: a wheel that is part monstrance, part target; a spear that is part axis mundi, part javelin. By choosing Latin, Hartley cloaks personal desire and spiritual yearning in classical distance, much as he will later cloak homoerotic grief in military emblems. Language and form become two rails of the same charged circuit.
Architecture of the Composition: Wheel, Wedge, and Spear
Formally, “Raptus” is a marvel of engineered tension. A monumental golden ring dominates the upper half, subdivided like a clock face but radiating more like a sun. From the ring’s center three white-and-yellow beams descend in a triangular spread, converging just above the painted word before extending as a single vertical shaft to the bottom edge. This creates a Y becoming an I, a trident collapsing into a sword. Around these axes, arcuate reds, violets and blues buffer and echo the circle’s curve, while thick impasto edges keep every element from dissolving. The geometry is strict, yet nothing feels static because Hartley angles segments, flares edges and lets brushwork vibrate. The composition is both mandala and machine, a device for spiritual propulsion.
Circular Theology: Halos, Host, Wheel of Time
The central disc can be read as multiple things at once: the Eucharistic host radiating glory, the wheel of fortune spinning history, the face of a clock measuring earthly time, the roundel of a military insignia announcing allegiance. Hartley knew how powerful such polyvalent forms could be. The ring’s inner glow—yellows dragged over whites, whites scumbled across pinks—suggests illumination from within, as if the painting is backlit. The segmenting blocks could be minutes or stations, implying ritual sequence. At the disc’s heart, a faint rose-window pattern nods to Gothic architecture, fusing ecclesiastical memory with modernist reduction. Through that polysemy, Hartley constructs a theology of abstraction: form as sacrament.
Vectors of Ascent: Triangles and the Vertical Shaft
Where the circle suggests eternity, the triangle insists on direction. The three radiating bars explode downward yet point back to the disc’s center, enforcing both expansion and return. Their edges are feathered with strokes of violet and green, making them vibrate against the warmer ground. The long vertical bar that continues below RAPTUS acts like a plumb line or lightning bolt, bisecting the lower forms and rooting the otherwise centrifugal image. Symbolically, triangles have long signified trinity, stability, aspiration; Hartley weaponizes that heritage, giving his triangle trajectory. The eye is “carried off” along the bar, experiencing the very rapture the title proclaims.
Chromatic Heat: Gold, Scarlet, Violet, and Breathless White
Hartley’s palette in “Raptus” is feverish yet controlled. Golds glow like gilt altarpieces; scarlets throb around the word; violets and blues cool edges and deepen shadows; and white—thick, chalky, scraped—dominates, not as emptiness but as blinding light. He often drags a semi-dry brush so that underlayers ghost through, producing a vibrating skin. The gold is never metallic flat; it’s alive with ochre and cadmium pulses. Reds bleed into pinks, aligning with flesh and fervor. Blues hug the periphery, hinting at night encroaching on illumination. Altogether, the colors orchestrate temperature shifts that mirror emotional oscillations between exultation and strain.
Brushwork and Impasto: Painting as Physical Seizure
Look closely and the surface reads like evidence of an event. Hartley’s strokes are assertive, directional, often loaded so heavily that ridges cast shadows. White beams are dragged in single, breath-held motions, while circular zones are built with shorter, rotary dabs. Where forms meet, paint overlaps, creating seams that feel stitched rather than merely outlined. This tactility makes the idea of “raptus” somatic: the canvas records a body moving urgently, decisively. Rather than veil his process, Hartley flaunts it. The act of painting becomes analog to the state depicted—impulsive, irresistible, ecstatic.
Between Abstraction and Icon: Modernist Devotion
Although “Raptus” lacks figuration, it behaves like an icon. It has a central focus, a radiating glory, an inscription, and a hierarchical layout. Yet it refuses narrative. This hybrid status—devotional structure, abstract content—characterizes Hartley’s most innovative Berlin canvases. He gives viewers a place to project belief without dictating doctrine. The painting could serve as a secular altar to energy, a personal relic of emotional seizure, or a universal schema for transcendence. In this way, Hartley answers Kandinsky’s call for the “spiritual in art” while grounding that spirituality in tangible form and private urgency.
Linguistic Image: Reading and Seeing at Once
The painted word is not an afterthought. Its placement at the axis juncture forces reading into the act of seeing. Letters are chunky, shaded, embedded in the pigment, and they vibrate with the same reds that rim the disc. By integrating typography, Hartley anticipates later American artists—Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana—who weaponize words within abstraction. Here, the text anchors interpretation yet remains open-ended. The Latin is foreign to many viewers, ensuring that sound and shape take precedence over precise translation, reinforcing the painting’s push toward felt meaning rather than didactic explanation.
Personal Mythology: Desire, Grief, and Upward Thrust
While explicit biography is absent, Hartley’s Berlin period cannot be divorced from his emotional life. The upward thrust, the seizure implied by “raptus,” the sacred aura—all resonate with the intensity of newfound love and the terror of impending war. Hartley’s passion for Karl von Freyburg, soon to die in 1914, hums beneath these canvases as an undercurrent of longing to be taken beyond ordinary experience. The shaft could be Cupid’s arrow, a spear of fate, a phallic surge sublimated into geometry. Such readings do not diminish the painting; they thicken its humanity, revealing abstraction as a vessel for complex feeling.
Relationship to the German Officer Series and Subsequent Work
“Raptus” precedes the overtly militarized emblems of Hartley’s German Officer series yet already codifies the grammar he will deploy: circles as medals or hosts, bars as epaulettes or lances, words as keys. Later, color intensifies and motifs densify, but the structural spine evident here remains. After Berlin, when Hartley turns to mountains in Maine or deserts in New Mexico, one still feels the echo of this composition: a dominant central mass, radiating energy, vertical axes puncturing horizontals. “Raptus” is thus not a cul‑de‑sac but a launchpad, proof that once Hartley discovered abstraction’s emblematic power, he could apply it to any subject.
Reception, Legacy, and Contemporary Resonance
Early American audiences, unaccustomed to such symbolic abstraction, met works like “Raptus” with puzzlement, yet critics sensitive to European developments recognized its ambition. Today, the painting stands as a landmark in American modernism’s formative years, demonstrating that abstraction here was never purely formalist but entwined with spirituality and autobiography. Contemporary artists exploring diagrammatic mysticism, queer coding, or typographic painting find in “Raptus” a proto‑model. Its fusion of text and icon, geometry and rapture, anticipates cross-disciplinary practices where visual art borrows from liturgy, design, and poetry.
Conclusion
“Raptus” is a visual convulsion held in perfect poise. Hartley captures the instant of being lifted—by love, music, faith, or terror—and fixes it in a spinning wheel, a trident of light, a crimson word. The painting’s power lies in its simultaneity: it is both clock and halo, spear and spine, hymn and alarm. In 1913, Marsden Hartley proved that abstraction could do more than arrange shapes; it could enact states of being. “Raptus” remains a testament to that revelation, a modernist altarpiece to the moment when form and feeling fuse into pure velocity.