(Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Ĭonscripted into the German Imperial Army at the outbreak of the war, midway through his thirties and just after a period of extraordinary creative fecundity, Marc found this improbable outlet for his artistic vitality during his military service. The painted tarps were military camouflage, designed to conceal artillery from aerial observation - the work of the young German painter, printmaker, and Expressionist pioneer Franz Marc (February 8, 1880–March 4, 1916), who had devoted himself to parting the veil of appearances with art in order to “look for and paint this inner, spiritual side of nature.” Deer in a Monastery Garden, 1912. In the bleak winter of 1916, in the thickest darkness of World War I, several enormous canvases dappled in pointillist patterns of color appeared across the French countryside, as if Kandinsky or Klee had descended upon the war-torn hills to bandage the brutality with beauty. According to him, only animals had preserved a “chaste majesty.“Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” wrote Mary Oliver in one of the masterpiece from her suite of poems celebrating the urgency of aliveness, Blue Horses ( public library). 154.Īnimals in a landscape were, for the artist, a bridge between man and nature, whose vanished unity he wished to restore. (…) an animal’s unadulterated awareness of life made me respond with everything that was good.įranz Marc in: Dietmar Elger, Expressionism: A Revolution in German Art, s. On the whole, instinct has never failed to guide me… especially the instinct which led me away from man’s awareness of life and towards that of a “pure” animal. For Marc, animals were the ideal subject matter for depicting truth, purity, and beauty.
The image of animals continued to become ever more prominent in his art, almost entirely replacing the human form. Through rigorous and disciplined study, he created a general concept of animal and human forms. When living in Berlin, he spent countless hours at the Berlin Zoo studying and sketching the forms of animals from every conceivable angle. He devoted himself to the study of the anatomy of animals.įranz Marc, Resting Horses, 1911-1912, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, USA. His works embody the heightened anxieties of early 20th-century Europe, as people struggled with a rapidly changing urban world on the precipice of war. He suffered from severe depression, and nature was something calming for him. His analysis of color associated blue with the masculine, yellow with the feminine, and red with the physical – often violent – world.įranz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, Der Blaue Reiter Almanach, 1912, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, USA. Not only did he understand the potential for color to affect mood, but he also developed a specific theory of color symbolism. The color was also extremely important for Marc. Kandinsky wrote 20 years later that the name derived from Marc’s enthusiasm for horses and Kandinsky’s love of riders, combined with a shared love of the color blue.įor Kandinsky, blue is the color of spirituality: the darker the blue, the more it awakens human desire for the eternal. The name of the movement is the title of a painting that Kandinsky created in 1903, but it is unclear whether it is the origin of the name of the movement, as art historians found out that the title of the painting had been overwritten. He then met August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky, with whom he formed the group Der Blaue Reiter.
In 1910, Marc’s first solo show was held at Kunsthandlung Brackl in Munich, Germany. Franz Marc, Blue Horse, Red House, and Rainbow, postcard from Sindelsdorf to Paul Klee in Munich, 1913, Franz Marc Museum, Kochel am See, Germany.
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