Another of Taschen’s coolly laid out, large format, coffee-table-sized but light and handy paperback introductions to key artists and movements, this one devoted to Franz Marc.
Generally described as an Expressionist, Marc (b.1880) is most associated with the ‘Blue Rider’ art movement in Munich 1911 to 1913, before being killed, tragically young, in the Great War, in 1916.
Marc and animals
Marc is best known for his animal paintings. Partsch devotes a chapter to analysing their origins and development. Basically, he preferred animals to humans, who he found repellent. As he wrote to his wife, Maria Franck, during the war:
I think a lot about my own art. My instincts have so far guided me not too badly on the whole, even though my works have been flawed. Above all I mean the instinct which has led me away from people to a feeling of animality, for ‘pure beasts’. The ungodly people around me (particularly the men) did not arouse my true feelings, whereas the undefiled vitality of animals called forth everything good in me… I found people ‘ugly’ very early on; animals seemed to me more beautiful, more pure. (quoted page 39)
He not only theorised about animals, he loved them in real life. He was brought up with dogs and when he did a year’s military service in 1899, he spent it in the cavalry where he acquired a lifelong love of horses. By the time he was settled with a place of his own, in the 1910s, Marc owned a dog, two cats and – his pride and joy – two pet deer which he named Schlick and Hanni!
Note how schematic the animal forms are. And how stylised the background of zoomorphic snow, highlighted by blue and green shadows. From the same period comes a loving portrait of his pet dog, Russi.
The sense of depth and shape is created by shading which is (when you look closely) quite angular, and yet the overall feel is sensuous and lush.
Some thoughts
1. Brilliant draughtsman
Marc was a brilliant draughtsman right from the start, with a tremendous gift for depicting the natural world in oil paint even in his earliest works. Here he is aged 21 demonstrating the academic style he was being taught at Munich art school, delicately painting every leaf onto each of the trees in this landscape.
Just a few years later he was painting in a far more free and expressive manner, but the draughtsmanship is still awesome – note the fluff of feathers at the dead bird’s throat.
Not only is his figuration a joy to see, but the palette of browns contributes to the picture’s unity. In some other artists the early pictures are things you skim over to get to the mature works, but all of the early works shown here are marvellous.
The confidence of his broad brush-strokes is exhilarating, the light and shade on the right-hand woman’s dress, or the decorative squiggles on the left-hand dress – how cool and confident!
2. Marc’s short career allows in-depth analysis
Marc’s friend and mentor Wassily Kandinsky lived to the age of 78 and so the 90-page book I’ve just read about him had to pace itself and skim over various periods.
The exact opposite is true of this account of Marc. Because he really flourished for just four intense years the book can go into much more detail about this period, following the month-by-month changes in his art and ideas, quoting extensively from his letters, diaries and published writings, and from his friends’ and wife’s accounts, in order to drill deep down into these precious years.
For example, there is space to devote several pages to explaining Marc’s use of a prism to ascertain the purity of colour he used in the portrait of his dog in the snow (above), and to relate this to his evolving theories of colour. (Briefly, Marc believed that blue was the colour of masculine dominance and spirituality, yellow was the colour of feminine comfort, gentle and sensuous, red was the colour of brutal earth, and so on.)
Like so many of the rest of the avant-garde right across Europe (from his friend Kandinsky to Matisse) he was thinking and theorising about colour and its role in painting in a completely new way.
For Marc, as for many artists of his generation, the subject of a painting was becoming almost irrelevant – colour itself was to be the subject and most important element in a painting.
That said, and interesting to read though this kind of thing is, you can’t help noticing the number of times he ignored his own ‘theories’ and painted what looked best. Seen in this pragmatic light, it’s possible to think of the writings as more like transient offshoots of whatever look and style he was experimenting with during his brief, intense heyday, rather than cast iron rule.
Thus his schematic colour scheme doesn’t seem to apply at all to:
where the blue mane, red horse, and yellow field are quite obviously painted to achieve a vibrant dynamic affect rather than for any symbolic purpose.
3. The animal paintings
His animal style probably peaked in the depictions of blue horses around 1911, and it’s certainly this period of work which became hugely popular after the Great War and carried on being a bestseller in poster form (a picture of horses in a field fetched £12 million at Sothebys in 1908 – God knows what they’d fetch in today’s over-inflated market).
In her chapter on the animal paintings, Partsch quotes at length Marc’s views on how we need to stop painting animals from the outside, from a strictly instrumental human perspective, but imagine the world from the animal’s point of view.
How does a horse see the world, how does an eagle, a deer or a dog? How impoverished and soulless is our convention of placing animals in a landscape familiar to our own eyes rather than transporting ourselves into the soul of an animal in order to divine its visual world. (quoted page 38)
There’s much more like this. His friend and mentor, Kandinsky, was deeply immersed in the esoteric and spiritualist teachings of his age, becoming a Theosophist and studying Joachim of Fiore but to the modern reader, Marc comes over as by far the deeper and more instinctive visionary – the experience of reading the book right the way through is to experience the almost hallucinatory intensity of his intuition.
The Kandinsky book is interesting and delightful, but this book on Marc is genuinely powerful.
What does the deer have in common with the world we see? Does it make any reasonable or even artistic sense to paint the deer as it appears on our retina, or in the manner of the Cubists because we feel the world should be cubistic? Who says the deer feels the world to be cubistic? It feels as a deer, and thus the landscape must also be deer. (quoted page 39)
Hence:
And we feel the world to be deer with him.
And it wasn’t just deer: the book includes fabulous colour reproductions of paintings of horses, cats, dogs, bulls, cows, donkeys, foxes, monkeys, tigers, birds, mandrills, wild pigs and many more. Animal planet.
4. Prismatic – cubist – futurist
Many fans and buyers stop at Marc’s colourful animal phase in 1911, the poster-popular period.
But the really interesting thing about Marc is that he didn’t stop developing, in fact he sped up. the final chapter shows him developing an increasingly intense cubo-futurist style and actually making the breakthrough into utterly abstract works when — the Great War breaks out.
Thus only a few months after some of the prettiest animal pictures, he is creating paintings which suddenly take on board the full impact of the Futurists’ characteristic diagonal ‘lines of force’.
Not only animals but people are present in these paintings but in a completely new visual style, dominated by the fragmentation of the object.
Many critics then and now claimed this was due to the influence of Cubism, still a stunning new way of seeing in 1912. Maybe so. But as I flicked through these final paintings I couldn’t help remembering his reference to the prism, and I thought of those toys you buy children, circles of clear plastic (or glass, in the expensive version) which have been shaped to have multiple facets across the surface, like big diamonds which have been cut with as many faces as possible. The idea is to hold the prism close to the eye and see the world divided up into a bewildering variety of facets; to rotate it, move it up and down, whatever takes your fancy, in order to see ‘reality’ as a jagged mosaic of ever-changing angular facets.
Suddenly, in 1913, that’s what all Marc’s paintings look like, all shards and fragments:
Compare and contrast with the extreme simplicity and clarity of the dog or deer in the snow from only two years before! We are in a different, and much more complex, visual world, one which is more dynamic, fractured along strong striating lines, intensely scissored and segmented.
My favourite of these last works is Deer in the woods II, in essence an almost child-like portrait of a family of deer, but fractured by strong lines into cubes, squares, circles.
And it is these lines – rather than the actual anatomy of the deer, their ‘real’ appearance – which determines the colour scheme so that colours spill across the bodies of the deer rather than being contained by them.
5. The break through into abstraction
Right at the end of 1913 Marc began painting the first of a series of small compositions which were utterly abstract in form, with no subject.
Over the next eight months he painted more of these small compositions as well as a series titled Happy forms, Playing forms, Fighting forms and Broken forms.
In some of these works animals might just about be discerned, and he continued creating some dense Futurist animal paintings at the same time. But it is absolutely clear that in the other works he had stepped over a line into pure abstraction, just a few years after his friend and mentor Kandinsky.
Marc was working on these abstracts, as well as making plans to edit a second Blue Rider almanac, as well as painting a series of murals and writing more essays about colour and form – when the Great War broke out on 1 August 1914 and he was called up. What would have happened next?
He continued to sketch and sent copious letters to his wife in which he continued to develop his ideas about colour and form, but there was no time to paint in the army. On 4 March 1916 Franz Marc was killed by shellfire while carrying out a reconnaissance mission in a French village.
What a beautiful body of work. What an intense and fascinating trajectory he travelled in those four brief years. What a terrible, terrible waste.
Books & Boots 