.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
By late 1913 Franz Marc’s painting was beginning to take on an increasingly abstract form. Under the influence of his friend and colleague Kandinsky, the window paintings of Robert Delaunay that Marc had seen in Paris, and the dynamic energy of Italian Futurist paining which he had also recently experienced in Berlin, Marc began to consistently pursue a new vision in his art. It was a vision that he hoped would herald in a new world order of the spirit.
Formerly in the collection of Marc’s Blaue Reiter colleague, Heinrich Campendonk, Abstrakte Komposition is one of the first of Marc’s truly abstract paintings. Executed in tempera on a silver-grounded paper it is a stunningly original, fully-completed composition that both reflects and articulates Marc’s visionary aims for his work. The painting is one of a series of works made between 1913 and 1914 in which the animal, previously so central to Marc’s spiritualized vision of the world, has been abandoned in favour of a completely abstract rendering form as energy. These forms, which are here rendered as an elegant constructive geometry were, nevertheless, still rooted in a fundamental sense of nature. They are intended as formal approximations of what Marc believed were Nature’s elemental rhythms, energies and its always coalescing tendency towards the establishment of an underlying harmony or unity - something that Marc believed was both echoed in and intrinsic to the art of picture-making itself.
Forging ahead, alongside Kandinsky, into what would be a completely new realm in the history of painting, abstraction appealed to Marc because it was, he believed, a means of expressing the existence of what he saw as a single unifying creative law of the universe. His aim, in a work such as Abstrakte Komposition was, through the laws of painting - through its colour harmony, structure and a freeform, intuitively arrived-at design - to articulate a vision of the world as a single harmonious and universal field of primal forces. Such works were to express, what Marc once described as the overall ‘structure of the universe’, and it was this inherent ‘structure’ that was to become the subject of all of Marc’s later paintings, abstract or otherwise. (Franz Marc quoted in M. Rosenthal, Franz Marc, Munich, 1989, p. 36).
Formerly in the collection of Marc’s Blaue Reiter colleague, Heinrich Campendonk, Abstrakte Komposition is one of the first of Marc’s truly abstract paintings. Executed in tempera on a silver-grounded paper it is a stunningly original, fully-completed composition that both reflects and articulates Marc’s visionary aims for his work. The painting is one of a series of works made between 1913 and 1914 in which the animal, previously so central to Marc’s spiritualized vision of the world, has been abandoned in favour of a completely abstract rendering form as energy. These forms, which are here rendered as an elegant constructive geometry were, nevertheless, still rooted in a fundamental sense of nature. They are intended as formal approximations of what Marc believed were Nature’s elemental rhythms, energies and its always coalescing tendency towards the establishment of an underlying harmony or unity - something that Marc believed was both echoed in and intrinsic to the art of picture-making itself.
Forging ahead, alongside Kandinsky, into what would be a completely new realm in the history of painting, abstraction appealed to Marc because it was, he believed, a means of expressing the existence of what he saw as a single unifying creative law of the universe. His aim, in a work such as Abstrakte Komposition was, through the laws of painting - through its colour harmony, structure and a freeform, intuitively arrived-at design - to articulate a vision of the world as a single harmonious and universal field of primal forces. Such works were to express, what Marc once described as the overall ‘structure of the universe’, and it was this inherent ‘structure’ that was to become the subject of all of Marc’s later paintings, abstract or otherwise. (Franz Marc quoted in M. Rosenthal, Franz Marc, Munich, 1989, p. 36).