About this work
The eye lands on turbulence rendered in pure color — a churning swirl of bold reds, blacks, greens, and whites locked together in flat, overlapping planes that pulse with barely contained energy. *The Aero* is an oil on canvas measuring approximately 100 × 81 cm, and it operates at the edge of legibility: shapes loom and collide across the picture surface, evoking the massive cylindrical bulk of a zeppelin glimpsed from below, a fiery orb that may suggest an airship's explosion, and the exhilaration of a machine-age sky. Interpreting each of the various motifs in this colorful abstract composition is difficult, given Hartley's avowed intention to create "a decorative harmony of color & form as seems fitting to the subject in hand." The restraint of that stated purpose belies what actually arrives on the canvas: something closer to sensation than description, the visual equivalent of a roar overhead.
Completed in 1914, *The Aero* may have been the painting that Hartley described in a letter to his dealer Alfred Stieglitz the previous year as his notion of "the possible ecstasy or soul state of an aéroplane if it could have one."
Hartley lived in Berlin from May 1913 to December 1915 , and the city was intoxicating — zeppelins drifted overhead with a regularity that struck him as almost mystical. On a postcard of June 1913, he wrote of watching the great Luftschiffs pass "so majestically and so close that you see people waving their handkerchiefs."
A prominent red fireball in the painting has been linked to a zeppelin disaster of October 1913 that killed 27 people just outside Berlin.
Hartley's imagery from this Berlin period has been widely acknowledged as constituting one of the most original new visual languages of modern art, combining the influences of Fauvism, Cubism, and German Expressionism with his own mystical vision. *The Aero* now resides in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
On the wall, this painting demands a room willing to hold its charge — a high-ceilinged studio, a spare loft living space, or any interior where pale walls give the color room to resonate. It doesn't settle into a corner; it occupies the space it's given. The viewer it speaks to is someone drawn to the moment when abstraction still carries a pulse of the world — when a shape is not merely a shape but the ghost of something enormous moving through a pre-war sky. There's nothing decorative or passive about *The Aero*. It is a painting about exhilaration tipping toward dread, and it holds that tension with absolute conviction.
