Franz Marc

Maria Marc (the artist's wife)
Acquired from the above by the father of the present owner in 1917

Best known for his depictions of animals executed during his involvement with Der Blaue Reiter between 1911 and 1914, Franz Marc’s artistic menagerie included wonderfully colourful dogs, pigs, deer, long-tailed monkeys cows. But the most significant productions of his repertoire were his compositions of stallions and mares, grazing alone or galloping together in rhythmically executed landscapes. Marc believed that the horse, with its flowing mane and strong, sinuous physicality, symbolised the ideal beauty of nature. In 1911, Marc and Wasily Kandinsky chose this majestic animal for part of the emblem of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) (fig. 1), the avant-garde movement that they founded in Munich. Zwei grosse Pferde in Landschaft was executed that same year and exemplifies the objectives of this new wave of German Expressionist painting.

Marc’s first major composition of the horse dates from 1908 and depicts a placid-looking herd in a meadow of Lenggries, a village near the Austrian border. Over the following years Marc’s compositions of horses became distinctly more abstract, energised, and mystical in appearance. He painted his animals in fantastic shades of blue, red and yellow, claiming that his blue stallions represented contemplativeness and spirituality, while the yellow mares signified energy and sensuality. ‘I am trying to enhance my sensibility for the organic rhythm that I feel is in all things,’ he wrote of his art in 1911. Not wanting to be misinterpreted as a mere follower of the Fauves, Marc was careful to clarify the aesthetic intentions and spiritual underpinnings of his own ‘wild’ stylisation. In Der Blaue Reiter Almanac, he wrote that his painting celebrated the divinity of nature and fiercely rejected the values of modernity and the material word. He explained that like the earlier Dresden based group, Die Brücke, the artists associated with Der Blaue Reiter emphasised the distinctly German origins of their paintings: ‘In this time of great struggle for a new art we fight like disorganized ‘savages’ against an old, established power. The battle seems to be unequal, but spiritual matters are never decided by numbers, only by the power of ideas. The dreaded weapons of the ‘savages’ are their new ideas. New ideas kill better than steel and destroy what was thought to be indestructible’ (quoted in Mark Rosenthal, Franz Marc, Munich, 1989, pp. 23-24).

In Zwei grosse Pferde in Landschaft Marc puts these theories into practice. The two animals appear to be prancing around a central point, and their movement reinforces the sensation that the surrounding landscape is being swept up in a whirlwind of abstraction. The rhythmic, circular motion of the horses and vibrant colours of the composition call to mind Matisse’s exuberant La Danse of 1910 (fig. 3), a work which was a favourite of both Marc and Kandinsky and reproduced in one of the first issues of the Almanach. But in the present work Marc takes the joyous lyricism of painting to another level by applying the paint directly onto a sheet of glass. The inherent lucidity of the support and its interaction with the paint results in a textural smoothness and delicacy that cannot be achieved with canvas. Marc shared his fascination with Hinterglasmalerei with Kandinsky (fig. 1), whose interest in this ancient folk tradition reflects his admiration for Russian and Bavarian ‘primitive’ art. The resulting compositions, have the ethereal quality and spiritual connotations of stained glass.     

Der Blaue Reiter came to an end with the beginning of the War in 1914, and many of the artists involved with the movement, including Marc and Auguste Macke, died during the war. The surviving artists, including Kandinsky and Paul Klee, later acknowledged their debt to the spiritually-based, ‘primitive’ aesthetic that Marc had pioneered. In an article originally published in 1936, Kandinsky remembered his younger colleague Marc as an artist who ‘had a direct, intimate relationship with nature like a mountaineer or even an animal. […] Everything in nature attracted [Marc], but above all, the animals. Here there was a reciprocal contact between the artist and his ‘models,’ and this is why Marc could enter into the lives of animals; it was their life that gave him his inspiration. Yet he never lost himself in details, never saw the animal as more than one of the element of a whole, and frequently not even a vital one. He constructed his picture like a painter not a storyteller, and therefore he never became an ‘animal painter.’ What attracted him was the great organic whole, that is to say, nature in general. Here lies the key to the original, individual world Marc created and which others have tried to re-create, but without success’ (W. Kandinsky, Cahiers d’Art, nos. 5-10, Paris, 1936, reprinted in English in Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke, Drawings and Watercolors (exhibition catalogue), Hutton-Hutschnecker Gallery, New York, 1969, p. VIII).

Fig. 1, Wassily Kandinsky, Final study for the cover of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) Almanach, 1911, watercolour, ink and pencil on paper, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
Fig. 2, Franz Marc, Die grossen blauen Pferde, 1911, oil on canvas, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
Fig. 3, Franz Marc, Die kleinen gelben Pferde, 1912, oil on canvas, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart
Fig. 4, Wassily Kandinsky, St. Georg I, 1911, painting on glass, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich