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Lot Essay
Fuelled by an intensely spiritual vision of the world Franz Marc believed the purpose of art to be that of heralding or pointing the way to a new era - an era of the spirit that was diametrically opposed to the empirical and materialist ethics of newly industrialised Germany. Marc's vision was rooted in an atavistic pantheism common to the Romantic era that was personified in his case by animals and by what he felt to be their innate spiritual understanding of the world. Rarely seen in public since it was executed, Zwei Pferde is one of the first of the artist's mature paintings to attempt to visually convey this spiritual vision of the world through a synthesis of animal form, colour and abstraction.
"I am seeking a feeling for the organic rhythm in all things, a pantheistic empathy into the shaking and flowing of the blood in nature, in trees, in animals, in the air. " Marc had written, "I see no happier means to the "animalisation of art", as I would like to call it, than the animal picture. Therefore I treat it accordingly" (Franz Marc, Schriften, Cologne, 1978, p. 98). Of all the animals that Marc empathised with and painted, the horse was the most important. The blue horse in particular, was for Marc, a kind of spiritual alter-ego and certain of his paintings of it can be regarded as idealised self-portraits. Not only is the blue horse symbolically bound up with the originating concept of Der Blaue Reiter group that he had founded with Kandinsky, but, like this concept, it was a vehicle of spiritual breakthrough. With blue symbolising spirituality, the riderless blue horse was for Marc, both the symbol and the physical embodiment of pure Nature and of untamed spiritual intuition - the determining force, Marc felt, in the drive to create the New age of the spirit.
In the same way that for Marc, the blue horse symbolised the potential of spiritual breakthrough, blue mountains were often included in Marc's paintings as representations of his spiritual aspirations. In effect they depicted the spiritual landscape of the new age. Having developed this simple colour symbolism, in 1913 Marc began, under the influence of the French artist Robert Delaunay, to seek to create an overall synthesis of his vision; one that would express the innate symbiotic union between animal and landscape. Exploring a cubistic break-up of form and strengthening both the symbolism and intensity of his colour Marc's aims to create a unified portrait of his spiritual vision now led him increasingly towards abstraction. With its sharp forms and the radiating angular structure of the landscape mimicking and reflecting the angular bodies of the two horses, Zwei Pferde is one of the first of Marc's works from 1913 to show this growing tendency in his art.Indeed, in some ways, it can be seen as part of the transcendental development that began with the lone horse of Blau Pferde of 1911 and culminated with the abstracted tower of horses reaching - ever more abstractly - into the sky in the now lost 1913 painting Der Turm der blauen Pferden.
In his essay entitled "How does a Horse see the World?", Marc had asked, "Is there a more mysterious idea for an artist than to imagine how nature is reflected in the eye of an animal? How does a horse see the world, how does an eagle, a deer or a dog? How impoverished, soulless is our convention of placing animals in a landscape familiar to our own eyes rather than transporting ourselves into the soul of the animal in order to divine its visual world" (Franz Marc: Schriften, Cologne, 1978, p. 99.).
Through the abstracting of the landscape, Marc hoped to be able to express not just a sense of the synthesis between the animal and the landscape but also to emulate that sense of oneness by giving an approximation of the animal's different and unified vision of the world. In Zwei Pferde Marc has merged the forms of the two horses with the sharp angles of the mountains and the landscape to create a united composition of semi-abstract form and colour. Interpreting the space and form of the scene in a cubist way Marc's intensified colour flattens the overall composition and unifies it into a composite whole in such a way that the painting can be simultaneously viewed in two distinct ways. One, naturalistically, representing two horses in the mountains - images that symbolically represent the drive of the intuitive spirit towards the creation of a new age - the other, abstractly, as a harmonious integrated composition that approximates the sense of totality and the cosmic that Marc believed underlay the spiritual vision of animals.
"I am seeking a feeling for the organic rhythm in all things, a pantheistic empathy into the shaking and flowing of the blood in nature, in trees, in animals, in the air. " Marc had written, "I see no happier means to the "animalisation of art", as I would like to call it, than the animal picture. Therefore I treat it accordingly" (Franz Marc, Schriften, Cologne, 1978, p. 98). Of all the animals that Marc empathised with and painted, the horse was the most important. The blue horse in particular, was for Marc, a kind of spiritual alter-ego and certain of his paintings of it can be regarded as idealised self-portraits. Not only is the blue horse symbolically bound up with the originating concept of Der Blaue Reiter group that he had founded with Kandinsky, but, like this concept, it was a vehicle of spiritual breakthrough. With blue symbolising spirituality, the riderless blue horse was for Marc, both the symbol and the physical embodiment of pure Nature and of untamed spiritual intuition - the determining force, Marc felt, in the drive to create the New age of the spirit.
In the same way that for Marc, the blue horse symbolised the potential of spiritual breakthrough, blue mountains were often included in Marc's paintings as representations of his spiritual aspirations. In effect they depicted the spiritual landscape of the new age. Having developed this simple colour symbolism, in 1913 Marc began, under the influence of the French artist Robert Delaunay, to seek to create an overall synthesis of his vision; one that would express the innate symbiotic union between animal and landscape. Exploring a cubistic break-up of form and strengthening both the symbolism and intensity of his colour Marc's aims to create a unified portrait of his spiritual vision now led him increasingly towards abstraction. With its sharp forms and the radiating angular structure of the landscape mimicking and reflecting the angular bodies of the two horses, Zwei Pferde is one of the first of Marc's works from 1913 to show this growing tendency in his art.Indeed, in some ways, it can be seen as part of the transcendental development that began with the lone horse of Blau Pferde of 1911 and culminated with the abstracted tower of horses reaching - ever more abstractly - into the sky in the now lost 1913 painting Der Turm der blauen Pferden.
In his essay entitled "How does a Horse see the World?", Marc had asked, "Is there a more mysterious idea for an artist than to imagine how nature is reflected in the eye of an animal? How does a horse see the world, how does an eagle, a deer or a dog? How impoverished, soulless is our convention of placing animals in a landscape familiar to our own eyes rather than transporting ourselves into the soul of the animal in order to divine its visual world" (Franz Marc: Schriften, Cologne, 1978, p. 99.).
Through the abstracting of the landscape, Marc hoped to be able to express not just a sense of the synthesis between the animal and the landscape but also to emulate that sense of oneness by giving an approximation of the animal's different and unified vision of the world. In Zwei Pferde Marc has merged the forms of the two horses with the sharp angles of the mountains and the landscape to create a united composition of semi-abstract form and colour. Interpreting the space and form of the scene in a cubist way Marc's intensified colour flattens the overall composition and unifies it into a composite whole in such a way that the painting can be simultaneously viewed in two distinct ways. One, naturalistically, representing two horses in the mountains - images that symbolically represent the drive of the intuitive spirit towards the creation of a new age - the other, abstractly, as a harmonious integrated composition that approximates the sense of totality and the cosmic that Marc believed underlay the spiritual vision of animals.