Marc - Blue Horse I

Franz Marc (1880-1916) is one of the main representatives of German Expressionism. Animal painter, engraver, pastellist, watercolorist, lithographer, writer, he is part of the group Der Blaue Reiter.

He was this expressionist painter, influenced by the fauvists, by Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin. In his desperate quest for innocence, he wanted to paint "the simplest and most internal things" and the major theme of his painting was the horse. The horse, not domestic or placid, but questioning the landscape, carrying the rhythm of the universe, symbolic of the natural vital force.

Franz Marc transfers his mystical flights into the attitude of his horses. He relies on the symbolism of colors, conceived as music, and he plays with rhythmic curves between landscape and animal, as if in search of transcendence, of osmosis. "I seek a pantheistic communion with the vibration and flow of the blood of nature, in the trees, in the animals, in the air [...]."

Highly symbolic, this dreamlike painting from 1911 allows us to situate him at the confluence of cubist, futurist and expressionist tendencies, of which he achieves a masterful synthesis.

Blue Horse I, 1911
Lenbachhaus, Munich