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Marsden Hartley
Portrait of a German Officer
oil on canvas
1914
In 1913, Hartley visited Berlin and Munich, where he met artists Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. While in Germany, he was drawn to the extravagant military parades he saw there and began a series of abstract paintings, the first of which were exhibited in the 1913 Armory show in New York.
Even after the outbreak of World War I in August of 1914, Hartley continued to live in Germany and only after the death of his close friend, a young German soldier named Karl von Freyburg, did he return to the United States.
Hartley’s famous Portrait of a German Officer (1914) includes abstracted versions of von Freyburg’s initials and his own. The painting, in which military regalia is arranged to suggest a body, is both a memorial to Hartley’s friend and an expression of forbidden desire. Jonathan Weinberg provides a detailed analysis of the painting and what he sees as the overt homosexual content of the entire war motif series.
(Source: whatgodzillasaidtogod)
