Movement No. 10

Marsden Hartley · 1917

Medium

Oil on composition board

Original size

38.7 × 49.5 cm (15 1/4 × 19 1/2 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Modernism

Movement No. 10 is a vibrant, rhythmically charged abstraction that pulses with the same restless energy Marsden Hartley brought to everything he made during his most inventive years. Hartley painted this work in 1917, shortly after returning from Berlin where he had immersed himself in German Expressionism and Wassily Kandinsky's ideas about spiritual abstraction. The Movement series sits at the heart of that influence — swirling, interlocking forms in deep, saturated color that feel less like depictions of the physical world and more like visual music, each shape pushing against the next with deliberate tension. Hartley worked on composition board rather than stretched canvas for many of these pieces, a choice that lends the surface a particular density and directness. Kandinsky's 1911 treatise "Concerning the Spiritual in Art," which argued that abstract form could carry genuine emotional and mystical content, was a documented and acknowledged influence on Hartley during this period, and the Movement paintings are among his most direct responses to that idea. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is made to order by skilled artists working from high-resolution reference of the Art Institute of Chicago's original, matching its layered brushwork, tonal depth, and compositional energy on oil on composition board — giving you a faithful, lasting version of one of American modernism's most kinetic works.