Curator’s pick: Marsden Hartley’s ‘Painting, Number 5’ at New York’s Whitney

This article is part of a guide to New York from FT Globetrotter

The artist: Marsden Hartley (1877-1943)

Hartley was one of the best early American modernist painters. He travelled to Europe in 1912, where, in Paris, he got to know Matisse and Picasso through Gertrude and Leo Stein. He then moved to Germany, where he met Kandinsky and Marc, before returning to the US during the first world war.

The painting was part of a series that proved popular in Germany but drew suspicion in the US. Given both anti-gay and anti-German sentiment in the US at the time, Hartley said: “There is no hidden symbolism whatsoever in them . . . Things under observation, just pictures any day, any hour. I have expressed only what I have seen. They are merely consultations of the eye . . . my notion of the purely pictorial.”

The work was first displayed in Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery and was later acquired by an anonymous collector, who donated it to the Whitney in 1958.

Barbara Haskell is a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the author of more than 30 publications on early-20th-century and postwar American artists. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Whitney’s current exhibition, “At the Dawn of a New Age: Early 20th-Century American Modernism”, runs until February 26 2023.