Born Edmund Hartley in Maine, New England, he won a scholarship to study in New York where he would base himself for much of his life, in between long trips to Europe. He began painting in a Post-Impressionist manner, with dark, brooding landscapes, for instance Storm Clouds, Maine (1906–7; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center). In 1909 he met Alfred Stieglitz in New York, who introduced him to more contemporary work, and Hartley began to paint still lifes influenced by Picasso and Cézanne; this subject would continue to preoccupy him throughout his career. In Paris he discovered Kandinsky, to whose spiritualism he was receptive, and in 1912 he began to paint ‘intuitive abstractions’. In Germany 1913–15 he developed a more symbolic language: Portrait of a German Officer (1914; New York, Met. Mus.) is his most famous work, a still life of military regalia subtly eroticized by its very allegorical nature, it has become iconic as an example of the coded language of homosexual culture employed in the fine arts.
