Marc's colorful horses - Icons of Expressionism
Franz Marc is a myth: His tragic biography, his extraordinary artistic talent, his visionary spirit and his premature death in World War I. In 1916 Marc fell near Verdun at the age of only 36, but his outstanding relevance for German Expressionism, especially for the "Blauer Reiter", had already been established by this point. The motif of the blue horse, followed by green or yellow ones, is considered the most characteristic and probably also the most progressive in Franz Marc's art. It is particularly exemplary of Marc audaciously overcoming the local color and attaining a color of expression, which can be assigned to an object entirely freely and is solely dependent on the artistic will. This progressive step would eventually earn Marc a permanent place in modern art history. The most well-known implementations of this theme are, on the one hand, his legendary painting "The Tower of the Blue Horses" from 1913, which is considered lost to this day, and "Blue Horse I" from 1911, which is part of the collection of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich. The painting "The Large Blue Horses" (1911), which Marc showed at the Munich Galerie Thannhauser in the first exhibition of the "Blauer Reiter" from December 1911 to January 1912, and which today is part of the collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis/ USA, as well as the "Little Blue Horses" (1911) and the "Little Yellow Horses" (1912) at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, belong to these highlights of Expressionism.

Marc's "Green Horse" and the art theory of the "Blauer Reiter"
In the "Large Blue Horses" (1911) in Minneapolis and the "Little Blue Horses" (1911) in Stuttgart, the movement motif of the horse scratching its leg, which gives the animal an eccentric and at the same time self-contained form, is particularly characteristic. In 1912 Marc took up the famous motif, which emanates both calm and movement, in the present work "Green Horse" and finally in "Little Yellow Horses" (1913, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart). In contrast to the other works, Marc depicts this motif in the present composition in isolation from the rest of the group of horses, and allows significantly more space for the almost abstract landscape surroundings. The background no longer just shows luminous mountain peaks, but instead a prism-like broken, crystalline landscape impression spreading out in front of us that enters into a cosmic symbiosis with the green horse through the green branches in the foreground. Stylistically, there is a certain similarity to the contemporary works of Heinrich Campendonk and Robert Delaunay, whose works were also part of the first "Blauer Reiter" exhibition. Marc did not render a realistic account of the landscape, instead he used landscape, animals and color to express a complex spiritual feeling in form of an artistic composition. This testifies to the closeness of the "Blauer Reiter" painting to music, which Kandinsky aptly described in his work "Concerning the Spiritual in Art", published in December 1911 and reissued twice the year the "Green Horse" was made, with the following words: "A painter who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. […] And from this results that modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of color, for setting color in motion, etc." (W. Kandinsky: Concerning the Spiritual in Art, transl.). In "Green Horse" one can see this colorful rhythm, the repetition of the green, which carries the composition as a color motif that Marc uses to give expression to his "inner world", his spiritual-emotional sensation. Apart from the branches in the foreground, Marc has dissolved the "landscape" into an almost abstract color tone, which receives its individual character through the rhythm of the green, the contrast between black and white and the rhythmic accents of blue and red. But what is the character of the green to which Franz Marc gives the role of a colored protagonist in "Green Horse"? Green is the symbiosis of blue and yellow, it brings the eccentric yellow and the concentric blue into balance: "The blue by its contrary movement acts as a brake on the yellow, and is hindered in its own movement, till the two together become stationary, and the result is green. […] yellow and blue are hidden in the green as paralysed forces that can become active forces again. Green bears a lively potential." (W. Kandinsky, transl.).
Marc's mystical, enchanting animal depictions - the endangered ideal of absolute pureness and harmony
In 1911, the year the “Blauer Reiter” was founded and after impressionist beginnings, Marc took a big leap towards Expressiononism and an expressive color that was liberated from the object. In the following years of the "Blauer Reiter", which was eventually dissolved in 1914 when World War I broke out, Marc was at the peak of his artistic creation. From 1911 to 1914, he created his best-known works, among them "The Tiger" (1912, Lenbachhaus Munich), "The Foxes" (1913, formerly Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf), "The Tower of the Blue Horses" (1913, lost), “Fate of the Animals “(1913, Kunstmuseum Basel) and "Fighting Forms" (1914, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich). In 1913, Marc played a major role in the important expressionist exhibition at Herwarth Walden's ‘Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon’ in Berlin, for which he submitted a total of seven paintings, including the famous work "Fate of the Animals" (1913), which shows, among other things, two fleeing green horses and a blue deer in a prism-like forest scenery. In August, shortly after the outbreak of war, Marc volunteered for service. Like many other artists and intellectuals of the time, he initially expected the war to have a cleansing and healing effect on “a sick Europe”. However, when Marc received a postcard during the war with a picture of his "Fate of the Animals", he wrote to his wife Maria on March 17, 1915: "I was completely moved and excited at this sight. It foreboded this war, horrible and moving; I can hardly imagine that I painted that!" (Susanna Partsch: Marc, p. 76; in: Klaus Lankheit and Uwe Steffen (ed.): Franz Marc: Briefe aus dem Feld. Munich 1986, p. 50).

For Marc, the animal world, which exists in harmonious symbiosis with the plant world, symbolizes an ideal form of pureness, freedom and nativeness. His expressionist depictions of animals from the pre-war period are therefore always read as an expression of his mystical, transfigured search for an ideal of a peaceful unity and absolute harmony, which Marc had already perceived as endangered in "Fate of the Animals" (1913) in an almost visionary way. The fragileness and the subtly resonant imminence in Marc’s depictions of a perfect harmony among animals fascinates time and again. The composition "Green Horse" is also characterized by the tension between an ostensible peace and the activity inherent in the color green, according to Kandinsky, from the two paralyzed forces yellow and blue. Calmly licking its leg, the "Green Horse" seems to be ready to flee any moment, can immediately go from quiescent to agile, thus Marc brought color and form into a particularly expressive unity in "Green Horse". With his depictions of animals, of which most are owned by renowned museums around the world, Franz Marc left us highly expressive and atmospheric images. Due to their emotional character, they are of a lasting relevance and still hold a highly complex structure of possible associations for today's viewers.

In 1916, Franz Marc was released from military service as he had been declared one of the most important German artists. However, on his last day of service on March 4, 1916, he was killed by shrapnel on a messenger ride not far from Verdun. The same year two memorial exhibitions took place in Munich and Berlin. In 1920, his wife Maria Marc published his war letters and the field sketchbook through Paul Cassirer’s publishing house. [JS]