Hartley and Duchamp On Background

marsden hartley's 1914 painting the warriors is mostly horses' asses, a field of pale white soldiers with plumed hats mounted on mostly red horses, heading away across mostly orange ground, toward the top of the image. in the center is a pyramidal, or perhaps fountain-shaped composition of one figure on horseback at the top and three figures on horses below, in profile, standing amid clouds of glory on a curved red base. via the mhlp
Marsden Hartley, The Warriors, aka No Title #68, aka Warriors, aka Pt-0159, 1914, 47 1/2 x 47 1/4 in., oil on canvas, photographed for the Marsden Hartley Legacy Project by Joshua Nefsky

Speaking of Marcel Duchamp, it’s always wild to me that the Alfred Stieglitz photo Marcel Duchamp used to introduce Fountain to the world set the urinal against Marsden Hartley’s 1914 German-era painting, [The] Warriors.

alfred stieglitz's 1917 photo of duchamp's fountain is black and white portrait of a urinal turned onto its back sitting on a pedestal that it overhangs. the shape of the urinal is like a seated cloaked virgin mary or the buddha. the busy dark background turns out to be marsden hartley's painting the warriors. the photo is published in a page of the blind man, no. 2, in may 1917, with the caption: the exhibit refused by the independents
Alfred Stieglitz, Fountain by R. Mutt, The Blind Man, May 1917, via Wikipedia/The Met

What Richard Schiff wrote about that Jasper Johns ink drawing of Flag on Orange Field applies here, too: “It need not be orange anymore than a monochromatic photograph of a rainbow need be multicolored. The medium determines how the qualities of a work appear.” But seeing things in color sure does change things. I got kind of annoyed by the end of the podcast and am not going back, but I think Helen Molesworth was talking about how Duchamp’s Fountain was an image before it was an object.

Now I wonder what the relationship between Mutt’s urinal and Hartley’s painting was like when they were photographed together. I’d assumed it was just lying around 291, but the Marsden Hartley Legacy Project notes that in March 1917, Warriors was exhibited at Ardsley Studios in Brooklyn, alongside paintings by Morton Schamberg. That was a month before Fountain was submitted to the Independents. Ardsley Studios was the project of Hamilton Easter Field, a rich, gay Brooklyn Quaker whose family’s estate on the North Shore was apparently inspiration for the site, if not the style, of Fitzgerald’s West Egg.

martin schamberg's sepia photo of a scarred sink drain trap mounted upside down to a white board at the bottom of the image. the background is a neat machine like drawing or painting by schamberg himself, though he has been long wrongly credited with the sculpture as well. it is by elsa von freytag lohringhoven. this 1917 photo is at the met
Elsa von Freytag-Lohringhoven, God, 1917, pipe on mitre box, photographed by Morton Schamberg with one of Schamberg’s paintings in the background, collection: metmuseum.org

But more to the point at hand, perhaps, is Schamberg, who, also in 1917, photographed a sculpture made from plumbing in front of a painting. One of Schamberg’s own paintings was the backdrop for at least one of the pictures he made of God, Elsa von Freytag-Lohringhoven’s drain trap mounted on a mitre box.

a digital collage of stieglitz's black and white photo of duchamp's urinal sculpture fountain overlaid on the color image of entire painting by marsden hartley that's in the background. which makes apparent the similarities between the outline of the urinal and the triangular composition at the center of hartley's painting, a detail it is not possible to discern from the version duchamp published in 1917
I was just thinking of the color, and did not expect to see the form of Duchamp’s Fountain echoing the composition of Hartley’s Warriors, but here we are. William Camfield figures this is why Stieglitz chose the painting, which is several assumptions.

Anyway, this hacked collage is of little help to understanding the site of Stieglitz’s photograph, but maybe it’s a start. I think there was more going on in the background than it seemed.

[A few minutes later update] As noted above and surprising no one, Fountain expert William Camfield noted the two works’ formal similarities. From Warriors‘ exhibition history, I think the first or even only time so far that the painting has been exhibited in the context of Fountain is Sarah Greenough’s 2001 show at the National Gallery, Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries. The checklist included both The Blind Man and the painting, but also a 1964 Schwarz replica of Fountain. I’ll look for an installation shot.