About this work
There is no single painting by Hartley with the standalone title *Military* in any major collection record I can locate. However, the search results reveal that Hartley produced a closely related body of work from his Berlin years — including paintings and drawings with titles like *Military Symbols 1, 2, and 3* (all c. 1913–14, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). Given that the title "Military" almost certainly refers to one of these works in this Berlin-period series, I have enough grounded material to write an accurate, specific description rooted in that body of work and its well-documented visual language.
The canvas arrives like a dispatch from the edge of history — dense, declarative, and impossible to look away from. Fragments of flags, banners, medals, and insignia crowd the surface , assembled not as documentation but as emotional grammar. Working in a manner closely related to Synthetic Cubism, Hartley combined various military motifs: flags, uniforms, and medals into an abstract whole that reads simultaneously as pattern, parade, and elegy. The paintings from this period literally explode off the canvas, composed of bright, starkly contrasting colours that directly border one another — deep reds pressing against black, white geometric forms locked in tension with gold and iron grey. The composition evokes the dynamism, pageantry, and danger of life in Berlin during World War I, its collagelike appearance, dramatic color, and emotional brushwork attesting to Hartley's skillful synthesis of Cubism and German Expressionism.
Painted during Hartley's two-and-a-half-year stay in Berlin (May 1913 to December 1915), this work belongs to his War Motif series — a group of paintings begun in 1914, after the start of World War I and the subsequent death of Karl von Freyburg, Hartley's close friend and possible lover.
His work during this period was a combination of abstraction and German Expressionism, fueled by his personal brand of mysticism, and many of his Berlin paintings were inspired by the German military pageantry then on display — though his view of this subject changed after the outbreak of World War I, once war was no longer "a romantic but a real reality."
The years 1913 to 1915 marked an apogee of abstraction in his career, during which he developed a completely independent vernacular that placed him at the forefront of the avant-garde of the time.
Nearly a half-century later, this combination of bright color and composition with popular signage, informed by the coding of gay culture, was to make a strong impact on Pop artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Indiana.
On a wall, *Military* commands a room rather than decorates it — it belongs somewhere with space to breathe around it, a hallway with long sight lines or a room where architecture is minimal and the art does the talking. It suits a collector drawn to the intersection of the personal and the historical, someone for whom abstraction is
