Robert Indiana: The Hartley Elegies with Michael K. Komanecky

Elegy: a song or a poem expressing sorrow, or lamentation for someone who is dead. Farnsworth Chief Curator Michael K. Komanecky will discuss a group of ten silkscreen prints by Robert Indiana, The Hartley Elegies. Created between 1989 and 1994 along with eighteen related paintings, they were inspired by a 1915 painting by the prominent American modernist Marsden Hartley did in Berlin in memory of his fallen friend and presumed lover, Karl von Freyburg, a German soldier who was killed in October 1914, shortly after World War I broke out in Europe. A few years after Indiana moved to the island of Vinalhaven, he discovered that Hartley spent a summer there.  Intrigued and inspired by Hartley’s work, Indiana created his Elegy paintings and prints as an homage to Hartley, with whom he felt a strong artistic and personal connection.

Cost: $10; Members, free.