About this work
*Morgenrot* is a painting of a red hand — palm facing the viewer — highlighted with white and surrounded by seven floating orbs on a black and blue ground.
The central figure of the upraised hand is depicted in vibrant red and outlined with a thick, contrasting white line, with exaggerated fingers and palm lines rendered in a stylized manner. The composition is confrontational in the best sense: the hand fills the picture plane like an icon, simultaneously urgent and ceremonial. Against the cool darkness of the ground, those seven luminous orbs drift like planets or ritual symbols, lending the image a quality that hovers between ancient diagram and modernist canvas. There is nothing decorative here — every element is weighted, deliberate, charged.
The painting is a representation of a mystical illumination drawn from the work of German mystic Jakob Boehme (1575–1624).
*Morgenrot* was part of a series Hartley entitled *Murals for an Arcane Library* — paintings done under what one writer called "the duress of the alien environment of Mexico," which were exhibited as a group in Mexico City in 1933 and stand as his most directly symbolic works since the German Officer series.
A Guggenheim travel grant, received in 1931, had provided Hartley with one year's support to work outside the country, and he chose Mexico.
There he had access to an immense library focused specifically on mystical literature and the occult, and became immersed in the writings of the Swiss occultist and alchemist Paracelsus. *Morgenrot* — German for "morning red," or the red glow of dawn — distills that immersion into a single, hieratic image: not a landscape, not a portrait, but a symbol, painted with the conviction of someone who had come to believe that certain forms carry spiritual truth.
*Morgenrot* lives best in a space that can hold silence — a study, a reading room, a hallway where the light falls low and direct. The painting is held by the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark , testament to its stature beyond the American canon it helped define. The print speaks to the viewer drawn to art that doesn't explain itself: the hand doesn't gesture toward meaning so much as *embody* it. On a dark wall — charcoal, navy, deep olive — those floating orbs will seem to glow. This is a work for someone who understands that a painting can be a form of thinking, and that the most arresting images are often the ones that ask more than they answer.
