“Marsden Hartley (January 4, 1877 - September 2, 1943) was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist of the early 20th century. Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, USA, where his English parents had settled.” (Wikipedia)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsden_Hartley

“By 1915, he had arrived at a style that combined decorative Cubism with the early lyrical abstraction of Kandinsky's. He was using a wide, brilliant palette and showing evidence of German militarism in repeated symbols that were often placed in flat areas of glaring color set off by ragged black patches. This very brief period was succeeded by an equally brief one of Constructivist canvases, pastels and neutral tones, with geometrically simple forms, held subtly together in an elegant and forcefully simple manner. Hartley then rediscovered Cezanne, in 1926, and evolved an emphatically decorative style that used an enameled surface. Hartley received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1931 and gave up his European travels for trips in the United States until his retirement to Maine in 1933. By 1931 he was painting in his final and most important manner, a simplified expressionism, bold in outline, vividly contrasting in color, and rugged in impact.” (By Barewalls Interactive Art Inc.)
http://www.dropbears.com/a/art/biography/Marsden_Hartley.html

“Portrait of a German Officer”
http://redtreetimes.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/marsden-hartley-portrait-of-a-german-officer-1914.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Tyk2yoqzVkE/TGaeN2zKXkI/AAAAAAAABQY/KowjRNJYna8/s1600/z.jpg

http://www.fineart-china.com/upload1/file-admin/images/new18/Marsden%20Hartley-827538.jpg

http://www.topofart.com/images/artists/Marsden_Hartley/paintings/hartley004.jpg

http://www.askart.com/AskART/photos/CNY20080521_5913/16.jpg

This is a close-up photo of the body of a decorated guitar, sitting in a music store window on the “Lower East Side,” section on NYC. I was drawn to it by its eclectic almost folksy art decoration. I’m paring this image with the works of Marsden Hartley, an important American artist of the twentieth century. Much of Hartley’s work share elements with the guitar decoration. The graphic symbols that are found scattered about as decoration on the guitar are symbolic elements taken from a variety of cultures. Hartley and the unknown artist who decorated the guitar appropriate culturally charged and highly symbolic forms. If you look at Hartley’s paintings often he incorporates forms from WWI such as the iron cross, and even on occasion even the Red Cross. Much of his work is decorative relying on pattern color and flat application of bright flat color. His work straddles abstraction and graphic design and includes hints of the narrative. I really respond to his use of color that is bold, direct, and “acidity.” I’m really enjoying rediscovering artists whose work I haven’t looked at in a while. I hope you’ll take a little time to look at and enjoy his work.
BTW: Yesterdays image was a close-up of an old and battered porcelain cooking pot found among the rubble of Centralia, Pa. the former coal town with an underground fire.