Part of a new series from FT Globetrotter in which art experts dive into their favourite work from a must-see current exhibition

Curator’s pick: Marsden Hartley’s ‘Painting, Number 5’ at New York’s Whitney

This article is part of a guide to New York from FT Globetrotter

The artist: Marsden Hartley (1877-1943)

Hartley was one of the best early American modernist painters. He travelled to Europe in 1912, where, in Paris, he got to know Matisse and Picasso through Gertrude and Leo Stein. He then moved to Germany, where he met Kandinsky and Marc, before returning to the US during the first world war.

‘Mt. Katahdin (Maine), Autumn #2,’ 1939–40, by Marsden Hartley © Emin Yavuz/Alamy
Marsden moved frequently before settling in Maine in 1937, where he focused his work on the state’s landscapes and local life.

‘Landscape, New Mexico’, 1919-20, by Marsden Hartley © agefotostock/Alamy
He was often on the verge of poverty, even destroying a hundred of his works in storage because of the costs.

© Whitney Museum of American Art
Curator’s pick: ‘Painting, Number 5’ (1914-15)
Hartley fell in love with a young German soldier, Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, in Paris, and followed him to Berlin. This painting was a homage to von Freyburg after Hartley learnt of his death on the battlefield in 1914.
Hartley wrote to his friend, the American gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, that he was now “expressing himself truly”. This work was one of several in his War Motif series, which reflected his feelings about loss, militarism and mysticism.

Style
Hartley was one of the first American artists to adopt the flat, geometric shapes of “Synthetic Cubism”. He joined that structure with the vivid colours of Fauvism and the spiritual content of German Expressionism.

Using thick, bold brush strokes and flat areas of intense colour, he captured the exuberance of the era while tempering that mood through his use of black, suggesting the pathos of war and mourning for the loss of his friend.

Symbols and obsessions
Hartley depicts the Iron Cross, which von Freyburg received, the epaulettes and brass buttons from his uniform, and the flags characteristic of the military parades in Berlin taking place at the time.

Hartley was an early pioneer of using symbolic objects to reflect a subject’s psychic and physical characteristics. The chessboard is a nod to von Freyburg’s favourite game.

The figure eight was considered a mystical, spiritual symbol of cosmic transcendence, reflecting Hartley’s interest in mysticism.
The painting was part of a series that proved popular in Germany but drew suspicion in the US. Given both anti-gay and anti-German sentiment in the US at the time, Hartley said: “There is no hidden symbolism whatsoever in them . . . Things under observation, just pictures any day, any hour. I have expressed only what I have seen. They are merely consultations of the eye . . . my notion of the purely pictorial.”