Tiere in der Landschaft (Drei Kälber und ein Pferd)

Animals were for Marc superior to human beings in the respect that they responded to and lived closer to nature than modern man. Inspired by Nietzsche in the seeking of a new age of the spirit, which would be diametrically opposed to the empirical and materialist ethics of newly industrialised Germany, Franz Marc's portend for this new era was the animal. Marc maintained that the serenity of animals and their relationship with nature held the key to man's own evolution and spiritual salvation. As Tiere in der Landschaft shows, it was essentially the mystic connection between animals and the universe that Marc sought to express in his art. 'I am seeking a feeling for the organic rhythm in all things' he wrote, 'a pantheistic emphathy into the shaking and flowing of the blood in nature, in trees, in animals, in the air... 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, K. Lankheit (ed.), Cologne, 1978, p. 98).