Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1916 (Heft 48))

“The Germanic group is but part of a series which I had contemplated of movementsTn
various areas of war activity from which I was prevented, owing to the difficulties of travel.
The forms are only those which I have observed casually from day to day. There is no hidden
symbolism whatsoever in them; there is no slight intention of that anywhere. Things under ob-
servation, just pictures of any day, any hour. I have expressed only what I have seen. They
are merely consultations of the eye, in no sense problems, my notion of the purely pictural.”
This calm, unequivocal statement that Mr. Hartley actually saw these stained glass
window effects in Berlin and other places is enough to infuriate those simple minded students of
art who believe that a sincere artist’s own promulgation is the only gospel to be consulted in
regard to his work. But words are winged. Before flying off into a white passion at Mr.
Hartley I advise my readers to look sharply at his last phrase. The “purely pictural” is not a
term, I fancy, that E. L. Henry would use in describing his technique. When a modernist
insists that he is purely pictural he wishes to imply that his work is uncontaminated with
literalism.
Charles H. Caffin in the “N. Y. American’’:
Paintings by Marsden Hartley are being shown at the Photo-Secession Gallery, No. 291
Fifth Avenue. They represent the work of the past two years, which he has spent in Berlin,
supplemented by a few examples painted since his recent return to New York.
Some of these paintings were seen in the late Forum Exhibition, and it will be recalled
that they might be described in a loose way as color patterns, composed in part of recognizable
objects, and in part of geometric forms—circles, triangles, and so forth.
It was when he went abroad some three or four years ago, visiting first Paris, that he
abandoned the landscapes with which he had been associated previously and set about develop-
ing these abstract expressions of his sensations. The earliest examples were inclined to be tur-
bid in color and confused, or at least over-complicated, in design. My own impression at the
time was that under the stress of new experiences, so vastly different from the narrow environ-
ment of the New England mountains, among which he had spent the greater part of his life,
new sensations had crowded upon him so hurriedly and hotly that for the nonce he was like a
man whelmed in a torrent, now spinning around, now swept onward, struggling to keep his head
above the water.
All this is now changed. Hartley has found his bearings, mental and emotional; and
proves it in the superior organization of these later subjects, and in their purer and finer color.
The color combinations now have a clarity and resonance, as of bells and the music of brass and
silver instruments, threading the sunny air with glad and often jubilant rhythms. For the
distinction of these compositions is the rhythm of their designs. They have their origin, one
feels sure, in a stimulated consciousness of rhythms; so that, as I hinted above, it is short-
sighted to speak of them as patterns. They are compositions—organic arrangements of form
and color that have grown out of and on to the rhythms, the feeling of accented movement
that has been stirred in the artist’s consciousness by his experience of certain sensations.
He tells us that he has expressed only what he has seen, “things under observation.”
This is no doubt true of many of these paintings; but there are others, such as the two which
record, respectively, his sensations on hearing of the death of a friend’s horse and on reading a
friend’s description of a dream. The motive of these is scarcely what has been seen, unless
it be in the mind’s eye.
A poet once wrote an elegy on the death of a canary. One can imagine the motive first
taking shape as a haunting rhythmic lilt, which he later clothed with the substance of thought
and the flesh of words, which by the nature of the case would present to our minds a movement
of tangible ideas.
On the other hand, had a musician been impelled by such a motive, he too would have
shaped his sensations in a flow of rhythms, upon which he would proceed to construct a melody,
furnished forth with harmonies. But in his case the ideas expressed would be, as compared
with the poet’s, intangible. It is somewhere between these two forms of intangible expressions
that Hartley’s compositions may be placed.
While the whole has the intangibility of abstract expression, many of the details are
recognizably concrete—flags, spurs, caps, and so forth; used, however, not in a representative
way, but as symbols of expression. This, by the way, does not imply a “hidden symbolism,”
which Hartley is at pains to disavow.

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