Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Marc went on to ascribe not only emotional but spiritual attributes to the primary colors, writing to Macke:īlue is the male principle, stern and spiritual. Exactly a century after Goethe devised his psychology of color and emotion, Macke and Marc created a kind of synesthetic color wheel of tones, assigning sombre sounds to blue, joyful sounds to yellow, and a brutality of discord to red. At the end of that year, Marc began corresponding with the twenty-two-year-old writer and pianist Lisbeth Macke, who was married to one of the Blue Rider artists, about the relationship between color and emotion through the lens of music. In 1910, just before he turned thirty, Marc became a founding member of The Blue Rider - a journal that became an epicenter of the German Expressionist community that included artists like Kandinsky, who had just formalized his thinking on the role of the spiritual in art, and Klee. (Available as a print.) The Large Blue Horses, 1911. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)Īnimals, Marc felt, were in many ways superior to humans - more honest in their expression of their inner truths, in more direct contact with the inner truths of nature:Īnimals with their virginal sense of life awakened all that was good in me. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.) The Foxes, 1913. An inscription appeared under the canvas in Marc’s hand: “And all being is flaming agony.”ĭestroyed in a warehouse fire in 1916, The Fate of the Animals was restored by Marc’s close friend Paul Klee, who painstakingly recreated the oil canvas from surviving photographs. The Fate of the Animals, 1913.Īmong the paintings he produced in those two ecstatically prolific years just before he was drafted was The Fate of the Animals - an arresting depiction of the interplay of beauty and brutality, terror and tenderness, in the chaos of life. Within a month of painting them, Marc was dead - a shell explosion in the first days of the war’s longest battle sent a metal splinter into his skull, killing him instantly while a German government official was compiling a list of prominent artists to be recalled from military service as national treasures, with Marc’s name on it. Unlikely to have had any practical advantage over ordinary camouflage, his colossal canvases are almost certain to have served as a psychological lifeline for the young artist drafted into the machinery of death. (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. “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).
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