Movement
1913
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
119.5 × 119 cm (47 × 46 7/8 in.)
Classification
oil on canvas
Department
Arts of the Americas
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
65916
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
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 spir...
About the Artist
Marsden Hartley · 1877–1943
Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) was one of the most significant and searching figures of American modernism, an artist whose restless travels and personal intensity drove him to synthesize European avant-garde currents with a deeply American sensibility rooted in landscape, loss, and spiritual longing. Born in Lewiston, Maine, he studied at the Cleveland School of Art and later at the National Academy...