Image source: artvee.com
Introduction
Marsden Hartley’s “Abstraction” from 1913 is a charged convergence of color, geometry, and private symbolism painted at the very moment the artist stepped into the heart of the European avant‑garde. Rather than depicting a recognizable landscape or figure, Hartley orchestrates crescents, triangles, discs, and pillars into a totemic configuration that feels at once ceremonial and mechanical. The canvas vibrates with reds, yellows, greens, and deep nocturnal blues, all hammered into place with thick impasto and emphatic black contours. What results is not an escape from the world but a synthetic language meant to compress experience—military pomp, religious awe, musical rhythm, and personal longing—into a single visual chord.
Berlin, 1913, and the Making of a New Vocabulary
In 1913 Hartley relocated to Berlin, where militaristic spectacle and Expressionist experimentation collided in parades, cabarets, and studio discussions. The city’s regimental banners, epaulettes, and pageantry dazzled him as much as its intellectual ferment. He encountered Kandinsky’s spiritual abstraction, Franz Marc’s animal symbolism, and the fractured planes of Cubism, absorbing their lessons while searching for an idiom that could hold his own obsessions. “Abstraction” grows out of this crucible. Its stacked geometry evokes a color guard turned into architecture, a shrine distilled from artillery insignia, or a stage set for an unseen ritual. The painting channels Berlin’s visual noise into a disciplined orchestration, revealing Hartley’s instinct to make order from spectacle without blunting its intensity.
The Totemic Architecture of the Composition
The painting reads vertically, like a standing figure or altar. A green rectangular shaft rises through the center, capped by a circular emblem, while a broad yellow crescent cradles a second disc near the base. Between them lies a tilted triangular plane, internally subdivided by pastel shards. Red arcs sweep around these elements, enclosing them within a rounded frame that suggests protective armor or a halo. Nothing floats arbitrarily: each shape counters another in scale and direction, creating a tensile balance. The broad triangle leans left, the green column punches upward, the yellow crescent curls down, and the outer red arc presses inward. This push and pull produces a sense of latent motion, as if the elements could rotate, hinge, or resonate like parts of an instrument.
Color as Emotional Voltage and Structural Mortar
Hartley’s palette is neither Fauvist abandon nor Cubist restraint; it is a calibrated spectrum where each hue bears emotional weight and compositional job. The dominant reds and yellows blaze like heraldic colors, signaling urgency and exaltation. Greens intervene as stabilizing chords, cooling the heat and anchoring vertical thrusts. Blues and violets pool along the edges, deepening the field and evoking nocturnal depth. Within the triangular panel, Hartley inserts softer pinks, pale blues, and lemon shades, suggesting a quieter interior realm. The black contouring stitches everything together, preventing chromatic chaos and lending graphic authority, much like lead cames in stained glass. Color here is not surface decoration; it is the very architecture of meaning, the voltage that makes the structure hum.
Brushwork, Impasto, and the Material Drama of Paint
Close inspection reveals that “Abstraction” is anything but flat. Hartley lays pigment with a loaded brush, dragging and stabbing to leave ridges and valleys that catch light and shadow. This relief-like surface underscores the painting’s sculptural ambition: the forms feel hewn, not drawn. The impasto also slows down the eye, forcing a lingering over passages where colors mingle wet into wet, producing tertiary tones that mitigate the bluntness of the primary palette. Hartley’s strokes often follow the contours of shapes, reinforcing their boundaries, but within each zone the brush darts and swirls, keeping the interior alive. The tactility of the paint aligns with the work’s ceremonial aura; the surface itself becomes a site of labor, devotion, and presence.
Symbolic Undercurrents: Banners, Relics, and Private Codes
Although the title offers no narrative key, Hartley rarely painted without symbolic intent. The concentric yellow arcs crowning the canvas hint at halos or sunbursts, while the encircled discs recall medals, orders, or mystical seals. The triangular tablet with internal fragments resembles a shattered flag, a folded map, or a stained‑glass windowpane, each possibility resonant with memory and longing. Scholars have long read Hartley’s Berlin abstractions as covert elegies, charged with homoerotic desire for a German officer who died in 1914. Even if “Abstraction” predates that loss, it anticipates the coded strategy he would use to veil intimacy within geometry. The shapes act like sigils—legible as form, secretive as text—allowing public display of private feeling.
Music, Rhythm, and the Idea of Visual Composition
The rhythmic placement of elements in “Abstraction” echoes Hartley’s contemporaneous fascination with musical structure. The repetition of circular motifs, the counterpoint of arcs and angles, and the alternation of saturated and pastel tones suggest chords and refrains. The eye moves through crescendos of red and yellow, pauses at the pale interior of the triangle, then descends to the bass note of the crescent and lower disc. This choreography invites a temporal reading: the painting is not scanned once but experienced in beats. By borrowing music’s logic of harmony and variation, Hartley loosens the need for figuration while preserving emotional pacing. The result is abstraction that feels sung rather than diagrammed.
Between Cubism and Expressionism: A Synthesis of Modernisms
“Abstraction” stands at a crossroads. Cubism contributed its lesson of planar construction and multiple viewpoints, visible in the fractured pastel triangle. Expressionism provided the mandate for emotional immediacy and saturated color, evident in the throbbing reds and slashing contours. Yet Hartley refuses to align neatly with either camp. He retains a central axis and symmetrical echoes foreign to analytic Cubism, and his forms are too architectonic for the psychic distortion of the German Expressionists. Instead he fashions a hybrid modernism—symbolic, structural, and sensuous—anticipating later American strategies where personal myth and formal rigor intertwine, as seen in the work of Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and even early Pollock.
Spiritual Aspiration and the Ritual Frame
The painting’s altar‑like arrangement and haloed crown suggest a quest for transcendence through form. Hartley had read Kandinsky’s “On the Spiritual in Art” and shared the belief that abstraction could convey metaphysical truths. The enclosing red arc operates like a chapel apse, sheltering the inner emblems from profane space. The green column rising to the crowned disc functions as an axis mundi, a spine connecting earthbound matter to celestial order. Even the thick black lines echo the outlines of Byzantine icons or folk devotional art. Far from being a retreat into pure form, “Abstraction” stages a rite: the viewer stands before a constructed altar of color where personal desire and universal longing meet.
Psychological Interior and Public Exterior
Hartley’s abstraction is a negotiation between confession and concealment. The internal, pastel‑toned triangle feels like a protected chamber, a mind within the larger body of the painting. Around it surge the louder heraldic hues, like the public world of flags, uniforms, and spectacle. The composition thus enacts the tension Hartley lived: a queer American artist in militarized Berlin, simultaneously drawn to and guarded from overt expression. By nesting gentle colors inside bolder ones and circumscribing everything with black lines, he visualizes the necessity of boundaries and the ache of crossing them. The painting becomes a self‑portrait without a face, a map of restraint and release.
Legacy and Influence within American Art
“Abstraction” occupies a formative slot in the story of American modernism. When Hartley returned to the United States, he brought with him not only European techniques but a conviction that abstraction could carry American experiences. Later artists would echo his synthesis of symbol and structure: Arthur Dove’s biomorphic color fields, Stuart Davis’s jazz‑inflected signs, and even Marsden’s own late Maine canvases all carry the germ of this Berlin moment. The painting’s totemic geometry anticipates the emblematic abstraction of the Abstract Expressionists, who would also wrestle with personal myth and universal form. In museum contexts today, “Abstraction” is read as a bridge—linking European avant‑garde idioms to a distinctly American voice that refuses to sever emotion from design.
Conclusion
“Abstraction” by Marsden Hartley is not a withdrawal from reality but a condensation of it, a ritual space where shape, color, and texture stand in for the passions and pageantries of lived experience. Painted in 1913 amid Berlin’s clamor, the work harnesses Cubist structure, Expressionist fervor, and musical rhythm to forge a private icon that still radiates public power. Its crescents and discs, triangles and columns, impasto ridges and chromatic shocks cohere into a single, resonant presence. Hartley offers no key, yet he provides a grammar: repetition, contrast, enclosure, ascent. To read the painting is to feel those forces working on the eye and the body, drawing us into an abstract drama that remains, more than a century later, vividly human.