1913
oil
canvas
From the collection of Art Institute of Chicago
Movement is a 1913 oil by Marsden Hartley, held at Art Institute of Chicago.
This painting shows jagged shapes in deep blues, reds, and blacks. Think of a city’s pulse caught on canvas. Hartley made it in Berlin in 1913, right before the First World War heated up. Hartley wasn’t chasing French trends—he chose German Expressionism and even mimicked music. He wanted colors and lines to feel like a violin’s swell, not to tell a story. Look up Vasily Kandinsky next—he tried the same idea.
Unlike many other American artists, Marsden Hartley was more drawn to German Expressionism than to French modernism, and executed this painting in Berlin. Made on the eve of World War I, Movement possesses a turbulent energy that sparks associations with both the vibrancy of modern Berlin and movements of music. Like the Russian Expressionist painter Vasily Kandinsky, Hartley sought to make his work more like music, which he admired for its nonnarrative nature and its potential to be purely spiritual or separate from material reality.
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, New York City; bequeathed through Georgia O'Keeffe to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1949.
New York City, Anderson Galleries, The Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters, Mar. 13–25, 1916. Philadelphia Museum of Art, History of an American, Alfred Stieglitz: ‘291’ and After, Summer 1944, cat. 244. New York City, Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Stieglitz: His Collection, June 10–Aug. 31, 1947, cat. 36. Art Institute of Chicago, Alfred Stieglitz: His Photographs and His Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, Feb. 7–Mar. 1948. New York City, Whitney Museum of American Art, Marsden Hartley, Mar. 4–May 1980, cat. 17; Art Institute of Chicago, June 10–Aug. 3, 1980, Fort Worth, Amon…
Read the full account in the museum source.
Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist. Hartley developed his painting abilities by observing Cubist artists in Paris and Berlin.
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