Word: marc
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...there a more mysterious idea for an artist than the conception of how nature is mirrored in the eyes of an animal?" wrote Marc in 1911. "How wretched, how soulless is our convention of placing animals in a landscape that belongs to our eyes, instead of sinking ourselves in the soul of the animal in order to imagine its perception." Marc's solution to what he saw as rampant anthropocentrism in artistic depictions of nature was to limit his canvases to a few key stylistic elements and to combine these elements into a unified whole. In the first four canvases...
...While it can often be tricky to talk about progress or development in an artist's oeuvre, this exhibit does give a good indication of how Marc's style transformed over a span of three years. The fiercely independent animals of "Grazing Horses IV" merge into what seems to be almost a collective consciousness composed of three round figures in "Large Blue Horses." The landscape emerges from the background, becoming a living presence that closely surrounds the horses. Color is reduced to mere essentials, to primary hues that had symbolic value for Marc. Blue came to signify masculinity, yellow femininity...
...Looking at these four paintings, you'd hardly guess that World War I was less than two years in the future. This was, in a way, part of Der Blaue Reiter's aim. Unlike the earlier Die Brcke movement, the second wave of prewar Expressionism-Marc, Kandinsky and their collaborators-did not paint the social upheavals of their time. Instead, they attempted to transcend social discord by creating images of other, hypothetical worlds. For Kandinsky, this meant a focus on apocalyptic imagery. And for Marc, of course, there was the natural world...
...just months before war broke out, Marc found it impossible to ignore the tense conditions in Germany. His painting "The Poor Country of Tyrol" is a stark contrast to his earlier depictions of equine bliss. With its chalky gray background, desolate black outlines and weak streaks of color, Marc's depiction of this disputed territory is a chilling premonition of the destruction the war was to bring. Marc's horses have not disappeared from the landscape, but they have lost all of their vitality. Their stick-like heads lowered, they serve more as symbols of the unhappy land rather than...
...Marc's later works show the influence of not only the tense social climate surrounding him but also the new and diverse artistic trends that proliferated during this time. In the last painting of the exhibit, "The Stables," we can see how Marc was influenced by the emerging Cubist movement. With its fragmented planes and kaleidoscopic shards of color, the viewer must squint hard to pick out the horses from the surrounding stables. The effect, once again, is a remarkable merging of subject and background into one unified consciousness...