Calla Lilies

Date

ca. 1928

Creator

Marsden Hartley was an American painter whose oeuvre was shaped in response to modernist trends in European art. In 1912 he traveled to Paris, Munich, and Berlin to study...He developed a style based on German Expressionism, which he synthesized into an individual visual vocabulary. Early in his career, Hartley began to paint still lives influenced by Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne; this genre would preoccupy him throughout his career...The influence of the Expressionists is evident in this painting. Hartley turns a simple subject--a pot of calla lilies with a broken leaf--into a somewhat sinister plant, its leaves undulating like flames and setting everything into motion, as if on fire. from Snite Museum of Art, Selected Works: Snite Museum of Art (Notre Dame, 2005)