About this work
*Indian Composition* is organized around a tipi shape that literally grounds the painting as a landscape, despite the large circular forms looming in the foreground of what remains a rather flat picture.
Across the canvas, brilliantly colored striped and circular forms, stylized seated figures with striped headdresses, and wheel-like star forms mingle with broad blanket stripes suggesting Native American decoration.
The pointed oval at the heart of the composition contains a Christian cross, a starburst, and birds — symbols of the Holy Trinity — evidence of the layered spiritual iconography Hartley embedded in every inch of the canvas. The composition's decorative flatness borrows from Native American textiles and painted skins, while its bilateral symmetry was inspired by religious and esoteric symbolism — a synthesis that gives the nearly square canvas the quality of both an altar piece and a ceremonial object.
Hartley conceived his *Amerika* series in Berlin, after seeing examples of German Expressionist painting and viewing a collection of American Indian artifacts in the Berlin Ethnographic Museum.
That summer of 1914, he painted the *Amerika* series — and on August 3, while he was completing it, Germany declared war on France.
A reclining horse appears in *Indian Composition*, reflecting the deep influence of Blue Rider painter Franz Marc, whom Hartley had recently met in Munich.
The painting has been viewed as reflecting Hartley's respect for the Native American's life, lived in harmony with the land, as well as the fascination with this culture viewed through the eyes of Germans, whose familiarity with the American Indian was influenced largely by popular adventure novels. The result is a work of extraordinary cross-cultural intensity: for Hartley, the *Amerika* series represented a fusion of the emotional intensity of German Expressionism, the abstract compositional structure of Cubism, a personal predilection for spiritualism, and a newly-acquired interest in Native American subject matter.
Nearly a square at just under 48 by 48 inches, this is a painting that commands a wall rather than decorates one. Its blazing palette and ceremonial symmetry suit a room with strong architectural bones — a high-ceilinged loft, a spare mid-century interior, or a study built around serious objects. Hartley seems to come to this painting less as an American than as a European — and as an artist acutely sympathetic to the difference between being on the inside or the outside of a dominant culture. That complexity is what makes it alive. The viewer who lingers will keep finding new symbols embedded in its dense, jewel-like surface — best understood, perhaps, through Hartley's own words to Stieglitz: "I find myself wanting to be an Indian — to paint my face with the symbols of that race I
