About this work
Oil on canvas mounted on masonite , *Musical Theme No. 2* is an act of pure sensory translation — an attempt to render sound as color, structure as feeling. The composition is built from interlocking abstract forms whose angular geometry and chromatic tension recall the contrapuntal logic of a Bach fugue: themes introduced, echoed, inverted, and resolved. Hartley literally inscribed his ambition onto the lower portion of the canvas, writing "BACH / PRELUDES ET FUGUES" to make unmistakable his intention to create a visual language capable of eliciting emotions similar to those aroused by music. The palette is characteristically bold — dense, declarative passages of color pressed into geometric planes that pull against one another with the same productive tension as voices in counterpoint.
*Musical Theme No. 2* is one of the first works Hartley produced in Paris, and it shows the direct influence of Cézanne — whom he encountered on arriving in the French capital — and the Cubism of Picasso, particularly *The Architect's Table* of 1912, which hung in the Steins' sitting room.
The references to music in this painting are tied to Kandinsky's theories on synesthesia, and Hartley was also shaped by his study of *Concerning the Spiritual in Art* and his discovery of the mystics Eckhart, Tauler, and Ruysbroeck.
In December 1912, Hartley wrote to Stieglitz that a painter from Munich had praised his work as "the first to express pure mysticism in this modern tendency." The painting sits at a pivotal hinge in his development — it is understood as a transitional work, connecting his musical-themed abstractions of 1912 to the military-themed German paintings that followed.
On a wall, this is a painting for rooms that can hold a conversation. Its abstraction rewards sustained attention rather than a passing glance — a work for someone who listens to music as seriously as they look at art. The compressed energy of its geometric forms means it reads powerfully in a minimal setting: a study, a high-ceilinged living room, or anywhere that silence and structure coexist. It carries the intellectual intensity of early modernism without any of the coldness — this is Hartley at his most intellectually alive, and you feel it.
