Franz Marc 1880-1916
By Isabella Bragoli
Franz Marc, Blue Horses, 1911, oil on canvas, 105.7 cm × 181.2 cm, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Franz Marc (1880 – 1916) was a German painter and printmaker considered to be a central figure of German Expressionism. Marc’s work is known for its ‘primal, mystical simplicity’ and endeavoured to create ‘symbols for the altar of a new spiritual religion’ (Rosenblum, 1973). Alongside one of his closest friends and admirers, Wassily Kandinsky, Marc co-founded Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”), a magazine publication series in which artists united in rejection of the Neue Künstlervereingung München in Munich.
Born on February 8, 1880, Marc’s interest in art developed from his father, the landscape and genre painter Wilhelm Marc. In 1990, at the age of 20, he began his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Marc would also travel to Paris between 1903 and 1907, taking much influence from the Parisian arts and responding enthusiastically to the work of Paul Gaugin, Van Gogh, Picasso, and the Expressionists, which largely informed Marc’s own style and artistic forms. In 1912, Marc met with Robert Delaunay, whose futuristic style fascinated Marc and became a major influence in the work he produced during this year. Stark works including abstract nature, bold colours, and sharp angles reflected the change in Marc’s style. Whilst the images provoked controversy in Germany, they pioneered the German wave of abstractionists in their desire to unite the new pictorial means from France with ambitious or transcendent subject matter, catalysing subsequent movements of twentieth-century abstraction.
Marc also responded fervently to Kandinsky’s notion that art should lay bare the spiritual essence of natural forms instead of copying their objective appearance. Civilisation, the artists believed, destroyed human awareness of the spiritual force of nature that was best revealed through abstraction. This philosophy is notable in works such as Blue Horses (1911), in which the simplified and rounded outlines of the horses are echoed in the rhythms of the landscape background, uniting both animals and setting into a harmonious, organic whole. This work is also exemplative of Marc’s symbology of colour. For Marc, colour had a vocabulary of emotional keys that is understood instinctively, echoing the way in which music can be appreciated intuitively. “I am trying to heighten my feeling for the organic rhythm in all things,” he once explained. “[I am] trying to establish a pantheistic contact with the tremor and flow of blood in nature, in animals, in the air – trying to make it all into a picture, with new movements and with colours that reduce our old easel paintings to absurdity.”
In World War I, Marc was drafted into the German army where he designed military camouflage and served in the infantry. He was killed by an exploding shell fragment on March 4, 1916, in Braguis, France. As a leading figure in the German Expressionist movement, Marc redefined the nature of art. His expressive linear forms and symbolic use of colour has influenced artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, shaping modernism in the twentieth century and beyond.
Bibliography
Hughes, Gordon. “Envisioning Abstraction: The Simultaneity of Robert Delaunay's ‘First Disk.’” The Art Bulletin, vol. 89, no. 2, 2007, pp. 306–332. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25067319. Accessed 8 Feb. 2021.
Morgan, David. “The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to Expressionism.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 57, no. 2, 1996, pp. 317–341. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3654101. Accessed 8 Feb. 2021.
R. Rosenblum, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, New York, 1973
For Rosenblum of Marc, see ibid pp.138-46. For a survey of Marc’s thought and artistic career, see F.S. Levine, The Apocalyptic Vision: The Art of Franz Marc as German Expressionism, New York, 19
Weiss, Peg. “Kandinsky and the Symbolist Heritage.” Art Journal, vol. 45, no. 2, 1985, pp. 137–145. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/776791. Accessed 8 Feb. 2021.