In March 1923, Marsden Hartley wrote from Berlin to his art dealer Alfred Stieglitz: “A simple streak of luck brought me a male model the nature of which I had seen much of here but could never get at. . . . This is the son of my shoemaker himself a former wrestler—with the result that this boy of 22 has an extraordinary array of forms such as I have wanted— and it is likewise with the heat that I can have someone pose nude without distress to myself or said model.” This work is one of only three surviving studies executed by Hartley during his stay in Berlin from 1921 to 1923. His exposure to the freedom of the city’s gay subculture may have emboldened him to more openly explore the depiction of the male body. (Furio Rinaldi, Color into Line, 2021)