Antiques.(Marsden Hartley)

Of course an over self-conscious straining after a nationalistic form of expression may defeat itself. But this is merely because self-consciousness is almost always a drawback. The self-conscious striving after originality also tends to defeat itself. Yet the fact remains that the greatest work must bear the stamp of originality. In exactly the same way the greatest work must bear the stamp of nationalism. American work must smack of our own soil, mental and moral, no less than physical, or it will have little of permanent value.

Theodore Roosevelt, "Nationalism in Literature and Art," November 16, 1916,Proceedings of the Public Meetings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1917

The five years that elapsed between the exhibition of the group of American artists known as the Eight, held in 1908, and the Armory Show of 1913, at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory in New York, where Marsden Hartley exhibited, marked a dramatic change of direction for the future of American painting. Like a number of other American artists at the time, Hartley went to Europe. He arrived in Paris in 1912, moved to Germany in 1913, and returned briefly to New York in November of that year. In October of 1914 he was shattered to learn of the death of Karl von Freyburg, a young German officer with whom he had fallen in love in Paris. Hartley's memorial to Freyburg grew into a series of paintings set against a flag with the Iron Cross hanging below (see frontispiece). But Freyburg's face is absent. Hartley's friend the critic Charles Caffin later described the symbolic meaning of the colors used by the artist: "white stands for 'flower-like purity,' red for 'glow of human fellowship,' yellow for 'joy of life,' and blue for 'more distant sensations of regret and hope.'" In December 1915 Hartley returned to New York again and exhibited his German officer paintings at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery.

American art students had been flocking to ...