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

Marsden moved frequently before settling in Maine in 1937, where he focused his work on the state’s landscapes and local life.

He was often on the verge of poverty, even destroying a hundred of his works in storage because of the costs.

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.