Movements

Marsden Hartley

Oil on canvas

Art Institute of Chicago

Movements is a boldly abstract oil painting executed by Marsden Hartley in Berlin in 1913, during what scholars identify as his first Berlin period. The composition pulsates with dynamic, interlocking forms and rich color, reflecting Hartley's deep engagement with German Expressionism and his desire—shared with Vasily Kandinsky—to make painting resonate like music: nonnarrative, spiritual, and liberated from material reality. Hartley, born in Lewiston, Maine in 1877, was among the most significant pioneers of American Modernism, and his time in Berlin placed him at the center of the European avant-garde, in close contact with Kandinsky and Franz Marc of Der Blaue Reiter. Held in the Alfred Stieglitz Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, Movements stands as one of the defining achievements of Hartley's Berlin years and of early American abstract painting.