Franz Marc

German painter

• Born: February 8, 1880
• Birthplace: Munich, Germany
• Died: March 4, 1916
• Place of death: Near Verdun, France

Known for symbolic paintings of horses and other animals and as a founder of the Blaue Reiter group of German expressionist artists, Marc contributed to the development of modern abstract art.

Early Life

Franz Marc (frahnz mahrk) was the son of Wilhelm Marc, a minor Bavarian landscape painter and lawyer, and Sophie Maurice Marc. He studied theology at the Luitpold gymnasium, where he made his Abitur in 1899. Introverted and melancholy even as a youth, he possessed an acute intelligence and a disquieted and searching mind. Spiritual affinities with German Romanticism led him not only to such nineteenth century writers and painters as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Caspar David Friedrich but also to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and to the ideas and music of Richard Wagner. Uncertain about his future, he first contemplated studying philosophy, but following a year of compulsory military service, he entered the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. Early works, perceptive portraits of his parents as well as landscapes, evince the naturalism of this conservative training. While a brief sojourn in Italy scarcely affected Marc’s artistic development, he christened a visit to Paris and Brittany in 1903, which had allowed him to see Impressionist canvases by Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Camille Pissarro, among others, a turning point in his life. These works, the first among the many by contemporary French artists who would so decisively influence Marc’s art, helped free him from his academic schooling while disclosing the possibilities inherent in color.

Between 1903 and 1907, years of liberating visits to Paris, Marc experienced a profound depression. Likely resulting from a deep-seated individual crisis that paralleled the spiritual malaise of his time and from misgivings about his vocation as an artist, this depression would be transformed in his mature art into a semireligious quest for innocence and for the truth concealed beneath material appearances. Marc’s restlessness led him to spend the summers of 1905 and 1906 in the mountains near Kochel am See, from which a number of landscapes resulted, and to journey in the company of his elder brother Paul to Salonika and Mount Athos in the spring in 1906. His first animal paintings date from these years, with some, such as The Dead Sparrow (1905), attesting his mood of morbid sentimentality. Marc’s depression reached its depths in the spring of 1907. In April, his father died following a debilitating illness, and Marc entered an ill-conceived marriage with Marie Schnür, from whom he fled on his wedding night to Paris. There Marc viewed works by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh, artists, especially van Gogh, in whom the captivated Marc perceived a spiritual kinship and whose brilliant canvases stimulated him to experiment with color.

Life’s Work

Marc’s break with the naturalism of his academic training was all but complete by 1907, and he embarked on a search for a visual vocabulary suited to the expression of his innermost concerns and ideas. For the remaining seven years of his artistic career, he would grapple ceaselessly with pictorial styles and techniques, especially with those of the French avant-garde, gaining an ever greater mastery over form and color as he adopted and just as abruptly discarded representationalism, Symbolism, and cubism, embracing finally, on the eve of World War I, an almost completely abstract style. From these experiments came memorable paintings, pictures important not only as works of art but also as portents of the mood that would mislead Marc, together with so many of his contemporaries, into welcoming World War I.

Once the emotional crisis of 1907 had passed, Marc’s depiction of animals and nature became more complex. Desirous of capturing the harmony of animals and nature, he still worked within the conventions of representational art, making detailed anatomical studies. Images of animals, especially horses, he believed, evoked an innocent and serene nature, one uncorrupted by the humanity he increasingly disliked. A well-received one-man exhibit at the Brackl Gallery in February of 1910 amounted to a retrospective for this style, which he was about to abandon. Receptive to new influences, Marc now came under the sway of Wassily Kandinsky, whose works he saw at the exhibit of the New Artists’ Federation in December, 1909. In January of 1910, he met August Macke and his relative Bernhard Köhler, who purchased paintings from Marc and who later provided him with a much-needed monthly stipend. Also during 1910, Marc saw works by Henri Matisse and Gauguin, further influences on his ideas about color.

Encouraged by these diverse encounters to think deeply about the meanings that color could convey, Marc continued to paint animals within natural settings. Yet, as the red horse in Horse in Landscape of 1910 or Yellow Cow of the next year make evident, they became less representational and more symbolic. Marc now sought to integrate his animals with nature and, by using pure expressive colors as well as simplified nonnatural forms, to make them carry the outpourings of his imagination and intellect. The symbolic and emotional values that Marc attached to different colors were explained in a letter of December, 1910, to Macke.

In September of 1910, the second exhibit of the New Artists’ Federation opened, featuring works by Kandinsky, cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and canvases by the French Fauves. Scornful comments in the local press prompted Marc to publish a vigorous defense of the new art. He then joined the federation in January of 1911, making the all-important personal acquaintance with Kandinsky the following month. Soon, however, the federation began to disintegrate, with disputes over the acceptability of nonobjective art serving as the catalyst for the departure of Kandinsky, Marc, and others in December, 1911. Meanwhile, the dissidents had already laid plans for a new exhibition, the first of two by the newly founded Blaue Reiter (blue rider) group, and for the publication of Der Blaue Reiter (1912; The Blaue Reiter Almanac , 1974), a celebrated manifesto of German expressionism.

To the first Blaue Reiter Exhibit, an international collection of modern art that opened at the Galerie Thannhauser in Munich on December 18, 1911, Marc sent Yellow Cow and Deer in the Woods I; in the second and last exhibit of February, 1912, he placed five works alongside contributions from France and from Die Brücke (the bridge), the Berlin group of German expressionists. The Blaue Reiter Almanac, edited jointly by Kandinsky and Marc, appeared in May, 1912, and it contained theoretical essays by Marc, Kandinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and others, as well as an eclectic assemblage of illustrations that ranged from paintings by the Blaue Reiter group, Die Brücke, and the French artists Picasso and Robert Delaunay, to folk art from Bavaria and Russia, to primitive art from Africa and Asia. Uniting these works, the editors asserted, was the aspiration to depict symbolically the nature of spiritual reality.

Marc’s art of 1911-1912 reveals new directions in style and mood, changes attributable both to renewed spiritual restlessness on his part and to a sequence of crises that threatened Europe repeatedly with war. Replacing the earlier harmony and serenity was an emphasis on energy and discord, on power and the potential for violence, concerns manifest in The Tiger of March, 1912, a picture in which Marc combined the techniques of the cubists with the color of the expressionists. Equally apparent was the influence of Delaunay, who had shown St. Séverin (1909) and Tour Eiffel (1910) at the first Blaue Reiter Exhibit and who now worked with abstract color as well as intersecting geometric lines. In such enigmatic paintings as the lost Tower of Blue Horses (1913), Marc began to overlap both forms and colors, a technique that allowed him to make his animals one with nature.

During 1913, the last year of peace before World War I, Marc painted his great apocalyptic canvases, several of which, including the hauntingly prophetic Fate of Animals , were shown at the first Herbstsalon (autumn salon) in Berlin that same year. Common to them is the theme of the catastrophic conflagration that necessarily precedes redemption, surely the same spiritual apocalypse that Kandinsky anticipated in Improvisation no. 30 (Cannons), also of 1913. These paintings also partook of a more general mood, one that, although engendered in the immediate instance by persistent threats of a major war, was widespread in both prewar expressionist art and literature; the mood anticipated the destruction of Wilhelmine Germany as well as bourgeois Europe as a prelude to a universal spiritual regeneration. When sent a reproduction of Fate of Animals in 1915, Marc responded from the western front that “it is like a premonition of this war.” Marc’s longing for spiritual transformation by apocalyptic act led him to embrace the war when it arrived in August, 1914.

By late 1913 and early 1914, Marc’s art had once again shifted course. In paintings such as Fighting Forms (1914), where recognizable objects have given way to relations among swirling lines and colors, he almost reached pure abstraction. Marc’s subject nevertheless remained the apocalypse that he believed imminent, although he turned on occasion, as in an unfinished series of woodcuts for the Book of Genesis, to its corollary, the theme of new creation.

This latest verge in Marc’s artistic evolution ended abruptly in 1914, for, immediately after the outbreak of war, he entered the army, serving until killed in March, 1916. During his military service, Marc ceased to paint, but he wrote numerous letters to his wife and friends, and he continued to sketch. His wartime drawings depict neither military life nor the horrors of trench warfare but rather abstract concepts of destruction and rebirth. Before his death, however, Marc had begun to question his earlier enthusiasm and to see in the war little more than the meaningless sacrifice of friends such as Macke, who had been killed in 1914.

Significance

Throughout the twentieth century, interest in the work of Franz Marc remained high, especially in Germany. Not long after his death, a memorial exhibition was mounted at the Sturm Gallery in Berlin in November of 1916, and, in 1920, an important collection of his letters and notes was published. When the Nazis confiscated Fate of Animals and displayed it in 1937 as “degenerate art,” a public outcry forced its removal. Since the end of World War II, exhibits in Germany and elsewhere have made both Marc’s art and his writings more widely known. As a founder of the Blaue Reiter movement and an artist who borrowed artistic techniques from his avant-garde contemporaries in France in his search for ways to express his spiritual cravings, Marc had a pivotal role in the evolution of pre-World War I expressionism toward abstraction. His contribution to the development of modern art is accordingly patent but still underappreciated in the United States. Marc’s enduring influence is discernible in the work of his friend Paul Klee; in the Blue Four, founded in 1924 by Klee, Kandinsky, Alexei von Jawlensky, and Lyonel Feininger; and in the aspirations of artists attached to the Bauhaus. The expressionist tradition, to which Marc made such important contributions, has also inspired such painters as Piet Mondrian and the American abstract expressionists Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.

Bibliography

Herbert, Barry. German Expressionism: Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1983. Two readable essays on the Brücke and the Blaue Reiter movements, excellent color and black-and-white illustrations, and appendixes listing expressionist exhibitions make this a useful introduction.

Hoberg, Annegret, and Helmut Friedel, eds. Franz Marc: The Retrospective. New York: Prestel, 2005. This book, which accompanied an exhibit of Marc’s work, features essays and reproductions of his work that trace his artistic development from his earliest pastoral paintings to his later work as a member of the Blaue Reiter.

Kandinsky, Wassily, and Franz Marc, eds. The Blaue Reiter Almanac. Edited with an introduction by Klaus Lankheit. New York: Viking Press, 1974. A translation of this important expressionist manifesto together with reproductions of the original illustrations. Lankheit’s introductory essay and notes recount the history of the almanac’s publication; a useful bibliography concludes the volume.

Levine, Frederick S. The Apocalyptic Vision: The Art of Franz Marc as German Expressionism. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. Since few of Marc’s writings have been translated into English, Levine’s work, with its suggestive readings of individual paintings, extensive notes, and comprehensive bibliography, is a convenient introduction; it should, however, be used with caution.

Marc, Franz. Franz Marc: Watercolors, Drawings, Writings. Text and notes by Klaus Lankheit. Translated by Norbert Guterman. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1960. A searching essay by Lankheit, one of the few available in English, on Marc’s artistic development complements good reproductions of his watercolors.

Rosenblum, Robert. Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. An always stimulating study, which is excellent on the Romantic traditions within which Marc worked and on those artists whose works have been shaped by it.

Rosenthal, Mark. Franz Marc, 1880-1916. New York: Prestel, 2004. An expanded version of a book Rosenthal published in 1979, when he was curator of an exhibition of Marc’s work for the University Art Museum in Berkeley, California. In addition to reproductions of Marc’s work, this new edition features more textual information about Marc’s life and aesthetics.

Selz, Peter. German Expressionist Painting. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. This essential study of expressionism, which focuses on Die Brücke and the Blaue Reiter group between 1905 and 1914, establishes the context in which Marc worked. Discussions of his career and art, together with comprehensive notes and a bibliography, make this a work to consult.