Too Cool For School

A revelatory new exhibition prompts Charles Darwent to reflect on the nature of American inter-war art

- Charles Darwent

In 1914, the American painter Marsden Hartley set to work on a 4ft by 4ft canvas, divided vertically by an arrow. Above this was a teepee and above this again, the wings of a totem pole. All these were highly stylised. Looked at in a certain way, the teepee, wings and arrow were not these things at all, but simply patterns, like the dots and chevrons of the rest of the picture. They were, in other words, abstract, or tending that way. Hartley did not want their symbolism lost, however. To make sure it wasn’t, he called the series, of which his new painting was part, ‘Amerika’.

Yes, that is Amerika rather than America, Painting No. 50 having been made not in Hartley’s native state of Maine, but in Berlin. He had moved there a year before and come under the influence of Wassily Kandinsky. Like Picasso and African masks, Kandinsky had discovered primitivism in the folk art of his own native Russia. By 1909, however, he had moved on from Chekhovian brides and barns and was working on abstract canvases with names such as Improvisation and Fugue. This makes Hartley’s Painting No. 50 an oddity; modern in what was, by 1914, an old-fashioned way. Its other peculiarity is suggested by the name Hartley gave to his series. Picasso may have been taken with African art, but he made no claim to being an African artist. Hartley, on the other hand, was using arrows and teepees to invent a modernity that was specifically American.