World War I’s longest battle, and one of its most famous, was the Battle of Verdun. Over
700,000 soldiers died over 300 days of battling. One of those soldiers died at the beginning of
the battle, on March 4th 1916, at the young age of 36 and left a sketchbook on the front lines.
In it, you can see landscapes and animals, all depicted with very strong and violent lines.
The owner of this sketchbook was Franz Marc and his presence in Verdun wasn’t his first visit
to France. Indeed, Marc travelled to Paris, as many young artists did, in 1903 and, again,
in 1907, to visit different museums and join the different art circles.
But it was only in 1911 that Franz Marc founded Der Bleue Reiter, or The Blue Rider.
Out of all the things he accomplished during his short life,
the foundation of The Blue Rider has to be one of the most important. He created
it with other notable artists of the time, including, most famously, Vassily Kandinsky.
The name Blue Rider came from Kandinsky’s interest in riders and Marc’s obsession
over horses. With their combined love for the colour blue, the name Blue Rider came about.
Both artist had a very particular relationship to blue. Marc saw blue as:
“Blue is [...]the masculine principle, astringent and spiritual. Yellow the female
principle, gentle, gay and sensuous. Red is matter,
brutal and heavy and always the colour that the other two must oppose and overcome!”
Kandinsky, on the other hand, wrote that:
“The deeper the blue becomes, the more strongly it calls man towards the infinite,
awakening in him a desire for the pure and, finally, for the supernatural...”
Blue was, to both founders of the Blue Rider, a spiritual colour;
a colour representing something bigger than ourselves, something powerful.
What bound the artists in the Blue Rider group wasn’t their similar style, like it was for the
cubists for example. What united them was the idea that art is spiritual, that it can heal
humanity from its alienation, that it can heal it from the anger and tension boiling in Europe at
the beginning of the 20th century. Art was a way to have men connect with their spiritual roots.
So back to Franz Marc. His way of expressing the spiritual element
of humanity was not to depict humans, as you might assume.
"On the whole, instinct has never failed to guide me... especially the instinct
which led me away from man's awareness of life and towards that of a 'pure' animal...
an animal's unadulterated awareness of life made me respond with everything that was good."
Painting animals and their awareness of life. Painting animals was Marc’s way to depict the
purity of nature, to represent a certain harmony. Humanity, corrupted by industry and modern life,
can’t bond with nature as it once did in its primitive form. The only way to access the purity,
the harmony and the spirituality of nature is by accessing it through the world of animals.
His Blue Horses, which he repeatedly reproduced, have to be, at least to me,
one of the best representation of this search for spirituality. We can look, for example, at Blue
horse I where you see the horse replicating the shapes of the hills in the background,
creating harmony in a mix of yellow, blue and red. In Blue Horse II, on the other hand,
we’re taking the blue horse’s point of view, as we would in Friedrich’s Wanderer Above A Sea of Fog.
But the striking difference between Blue Horse 1 and 2, is that, from the Blue Horse’s Perspective,
there’s is no red, the “brutal and heavy”, there is no violent colour.
The Large Blue horses, made in 1911, also depict the harmony between animals and nature.
The organic shape of both the horses and the mountains
mix. The only thing telling them apart is their bright saturated colour.
But as WWI approached and social tension rose, Franz Marc changed his style. His art, which was,
then, striving for spirituality became darker and more violent. He met Robert Delauney in 1912
who would influence him by introducing him to futurism and cubism. In 1913,
his Blue Horses went from being at harmony with nature, to this.
The Tower of Blue Horses is much more dynamic and one could say more violent than Marc’s previous
paintings. This artwork has an interesting history. It was confiscated by the nazis,
labelled degenerate art and was to be exposed at the degenerate art exhibition
to be ridiculed. I made a video about this if you’re interested. However, because Marc died
fighting for Germany in WWI, his painting ended up not being exposed at the nazi exhibition. Sadly,
the Tower of Blue Horses got lost in 1945, at the end of WWII and still hasn’t been recovered.
This newly dynamic and violent depiction of animals will finally
be at its peak in one of Marc’s most famous artwork: The Fate of the Animals.
This is one of his most violent depictions of animal figures. It’s showing a forest fire,
the red diagonal shapes sharply cut through the canvas, replicating the brutality of flames.
Remember, to Marc, red was the brutal and heavy colour. The horses,
the boars and especially the deer seem to be suffering, a reality rarely depicted by
Marc. The original title of the painting was “The trees show their rings, the animals their veins”,
but that was then changed to the Fate of the Animals. On the back of the canvas,
the original title was completed by: “And all being is flaming suffering.”
In a sadly ironic turn of events, the painting itself would turn into flames in 1916, just a
couple of months after Marc’s death. Paul Klee, another expressionist, would restore the painting,
adding a brown tint to his own work. Perhaps Klee wanted to leave a trace of this irony;
he didn’t want to cover up the beauty of a burnt painting depicting a forest fire.
Franz Marc was sent a postcard reproduction of this painting during the war. He sent a letter
back writing: “At first glance I was completely shaken. It is like a premonition of this war,
horrible and gripping. I can hardly believe that I painted it!”
Marc saw, in his painting, a premonition of war,
but what he didn’t see was a premonition of his own death.
The animals which he painted, through which he was hoping to achieve spirituality and peace,
burned and suffered through the ravages of a forest fire,
the same way Marc himself would suffer and perish through the ravages of World War I.
Thank you for watching. I wanted to let you know that I’m very excited for my next video,
you really should stay tuned if you like Dali and politics. Also stay tuned because
I’m planning something special for when I hit 5000 subscribers, which I’m also very excited
for! And as always I’d like to thank my patrons for all their wonderful support! If you want to
join them and help me out with the growth of this channel, check out Patreon.com/thecanvas.