When looking at this watercolor - in a format slightly larger than a postcard – we realize how Franz Marc once again succeeded in conveying the sensation he got from the mysterious creative powers of nature to us. We are moved by the grace of the representation, impressed by the sublime shapes of the animals‘ bodies in an imaginative landscape, impressed by the effect of the finely set colors. The artist's work was inspired by profound feelings for the animal, which instinctively moves in nature, and merges with it, and in all of this, the artist's observation appears to be out of this world: “Is there a more mysterious idea for an artist than this: How is nature reflected in the eye of an animal? How does a horse see the world or an eagle, a deer, or a dog? How pathetic and soulless is our convention to place animals in our concept of a landscape instead of immersing in the animal's soul to get an idea of its image circle? [..] What does the deer have to do with the world as we see it? Is there any reasonable or even artistic sense in painting the deer as it appears to our retina, or in a cubist form because we feel the world in cubist terms? Who says that the deer feels the world in cubist terms; it has a sensation of the world in 'deer' terms, so the landscape must be 'deer'. That is its predicate”, wrote Marc in 1911/12, thoughts that Maria Marc published in 1920. (Quote from: Franz Marc. Briefe, Schriften und Aufzeichnungen, published by Günter Meißner, Leipzig 1989, p. 233) Franz Marc took natural science very seriously, burying himself in the spirit of animal symbolism, which enabled him to indulge in his at times dreamy idea of an original world romantically and poetically. This way Marc rendered the yellow deer in circular, geometric lines that he derived from the animals‘ posture. The hilly landscape in fore- and background is incorporated into this rhythm of round shapes and gets into a circular movement developed from the shape of the animals‘ bodies. The artist united animals and their environment in a synthesis that pervades all levels of the picture, using a soft, flowing, organic formal language borrowed from Cubism. Franz Marc was fascinated by the cubist design and its quality to enhance the content, to concentrate it, and to fill it with its symbolically charged colors. Last but not least, the color palette plays a highly symbolic role in his compositional worlds, such as the yellow in the work offered here: "Yellow is the feminine principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual," wrote Marc in a lengthy reflection on color theories in the 19th century in a letter to his recently won friend August Macke in Bonn from December 12, 1910 (August Macke, Franz Marc, Briefwechsel, Cologne 1964, p. 28). Marc's mystical and enraptured depictions of animals tell of a threatened ideal of absolute purity and a harmonious symbiosis with the flora. His expressionist depictions of animals from the pre-war period are therefore always read as a mystical quest for an ideal of peaceful concord and absolute harmony.
The story of the art collector Hermann Bode is also a story of Modernism. Bode, born in Hanover in 1882, studied dentistry and practiced in Hanover. As a young boy, he met Mary Wigmann, who was also born in Hanover, and remained in contact with her for the rest of his life; she died in 1973, five months after the collector. He became interested in fine arts early on, had a passion for music, studied philosophy and anthropology, took part in cultural life not only in Hanover but also in Berlin, Weimar, and Dresden, and even traveled to Paris. Bode acquired his first works on paper from Otto Dix and Georg Grosz during the First World War. He became a member of the Kestner Society, founded in 1916, visited Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus, met Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee in person in Weimar and later in Dessau and was also friends with El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters, and was in close contact with Alexander Dorner, the director of the Provinzial Museum. Bode joined the "Gesellschaft für Freunde der jungen Kunst" (Society for Friends of Young Art), founded by Otto Ralfs in Brunswick in 1924, and was a supporting member of "Die Abstrakten Hannover", founded in 1927. In this engaged environment, Hermann Bode's unique collection grew steadily; he not only collected abstract art but also acquired works by Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, and others. Hermann Bode was a cosmopolitan man, his residences in Hanover and Steinhude were open to guests of all kinds, people came to make music, discuss, and listen to lectures, Kurt Schwitters recited "Anna Blume". The guest book was like a diary, providing spoken information alongside the all-too-private details regarding people from cultural life, with whom the collector frequently spent his time.
After he died in 1973, his wife Ilse, née Beindorff - her father Fritz Beindorff Sr. was the owner of the 'Pelikan' factories and the initiator of the legendary Pelikan art collection - and the children from two marriages inherited the Bode collection. Time and again, treasures with the provenance "Dr. Hermann Bode, Steinhude" turn up in the art trade, important works such as Lissitzky's "Proun 30T" from 1921 were secured by the Sprengel Museum in 2000 with the help of donations, and Kandisnky's "Diagonale" from 1923 was donated to the Landesmuseum Hannover during the collector's lifetime and is now on loan at the Sprengel Museum. [MvL]