Flower Abstraction

Poet, critic, and artistic rebel, Hartley became associated with Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery, where he had his first solo show in 1909. While in New York, he became familiar with other American avant-garde artists such as Arthur G. Dove and John Marin. It was Stieglitz who arranged for Hartley to spend a year in Paris, where he befriended avant- garde writer and art collector Gertrude Stein. Hartley admired the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, writers in whom he found a shared focus on the importance of nature to human existence. "Flower Abstraction" is a prime example of the paintings Hartley executed in Berlin between late winter of 1914 and the end of 1915. During this period, his well-known "War Motifs" combined symbols from flags and military insignia, such as bars, medals, and stripes, into flat decorative patterns. The bold, brightly colored forms reflect the influence of the French painter Robert Delaunay, whose work Hartley saw in Berlin, as well as the overlapping and interesting planes of Picasso's Synthetic Cubism. In "Flower Abstraction," which was painted at the end of his Berlin period, Hartley moved beyond literal military motifs to a more abstract and independent arrangement. The brilliant colors and jagged forms seem to burst forth out of the canvas, spilling across the colorful border onto the narrow inner frame, which incorporates motifs from the main composition.