FRANZ MARC, his quotes on animal painting art & Blau Reiter / Blue Rider; + biography / life facts of the German artist
Franz Marc (1880 – 1916), his art quotes on painting his beloved animals like deer and horses, and on his life in Blaue Reiter + biography facts. Franz Marc is famous for his colorful’ animal’ paintings like ‘Blue Horses’ and his Deer. He try to catch the essence of the animals in contrast to the Cubist painters, as he criticize. Marc was co-founder with Kandinsky of Blue Rider in Munich. Macke was an important painter friend for Marc, to discuss in letters on color and modern art facts. Franz Marc died young in World War 1. At the bottom are some useful art links for more biography facts of Franz Marc. – the editor.
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Franz Marc: ‘Large Blue Horses’, painting 1911 |
Franz Marc, his quotes on painting animals and artist life in Blue Rider + biography facts
- I am trying to heighten my feeling for the organic rhythm in all things, trying to establish a pantheistic contact with the tremor and flow of blood in nature, in animals, in the air – trying to make it all into a picture, with new movements and with colours that reduce our old easel paintings to absurdity.
* Franz Marc, artist quotes on painting animals, like blue horses and deer – on his art and life: letter to the publisher Reinhard Piper, 1908, as quoted in ”Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock – ”, ed. Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 207 (German famous painter with an expressive style and co-founder of Blue Rider / Blaue Reiter with Kandinsky; links for more biography facts at the bottom)
- Is there any more mysterious idea for an artist than the conception of how nature is mirrored in the eyes of an animal? How does a horse see the world, or an eagle, or a doe, or a dog? (Munich 1911-1912) .
* Franz Marc, quote – on his art and life: ‘Aphorisms’, Franz Marc; as quoted in “Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries”, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 445.
- What relation has a ‘doe’ to our picture of the world? Does it make any logical, or even artistic, sense, to paint the doe as it appears to our perspective vision, or in a cubistic form because we feel the world cubistically? It feels it as a doe, and its landscape must also be “doe”… … I can paint a picture: the roe; Pisanello has painted such. I can, however, also wish to paint a picture: “the roe feels.” How infinitely sharper an intellect must the painter have, in order to paint this! The Egyptians have done it. The rose; Manet has painted that. Who has painted the flowering rose? The Indians… (Munich 1911-1912).
* source, ‘Aphorisms’, Franz Marc; as quoted in “Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries”, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 445 .
- There is little abstract art, today, and what there is is stammering and imperfect. It is an attempt to let the world speak for itself, instead of reporting the speech of mind excited by their picture of the world. The Greek, The Gothic, and the Renaissance artist set forth the world the way he saw it, felt it, and wished to have it; man wished above all to be nourished by art; he achieved his desire but sacrificed everything else to this one aim: to construct homunculus, to substitute knowledge for strength and skill for spirit. The ape aped his creator. He learned to put art itself to the ends of trade… (Munich 1911-1912).
* artist quote on his art and life: ‘Aphorisms’, Franz Marc; as quoted in “Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries”, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 445.
- Only today can art be metaphysical, and it will continue to be so. Art will free itself from the needs and desires of men. We will no longer paint a forest or a horse as we please or as they seem to us, but as they really are. (Munich 1911-1912).
* taken from: ‘Aphorisms’, Franz Marc; as quoted in “Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries”, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 445.
- The people itself ( and I do not mean the “masses”) has always given art its essential style. The artist merely clarifies and fulfils the will of the people. But when the people does not know what it wants, or worst of all, wants nothing, … then its artists, driven to seeking their own forms, remain isolated, and become martyrs… Folk art – that is, the feeling of people for artistic form – can arise again only when the whole jumble of worn-out art concepts of the nineteenth century has been wiped from the memory of generations. (Max Beckmann had a different art conception and was reacting in the ‘Blaue Reiter’ (Blue Rider) around 1912: the laws of art were eternal, they existed without any change, fh).
* source: ‘Aphorisms’, Franz Marc, Munich 1911-1912; as quoted in “Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries”, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 445-446.
- Art today is moving in directions of which our forebears had no inkling; the Horsemen of the Apocalypse are heard galloping through the air; artistic excitement can be felt all over Europe – new artists are signalling to one another from all sides; a glance, a touch of the hand, is enough to convey understanding.
* quote on art in general: Franz Marc’s Manifesto for the ‘Blaue Reiter’ (Blue Rider) group, 1912; as quoted in ”Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock – ”, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 207.
- In war we are all equal, but among a thousand good men, a bullet hit an irreplaceable one… …We painters know well that with the loss of his harmony, the color in German art will become many shades paler… (1914, on the death of his close friend August Macke, who fell in the first months of World War 1., fh).
* souerce: exhibition ‘Die Blaue Reiter’ (Blue Rider), Gemeentemuseum the Hague, Netherlands 2010.
- The impure men and women who surrounded me (and particularly the men), did not arouse any of my real feelings; while the natural feeling for life possessed by animals set in vibration everything good in me. (from World War 1., fh).
* from: a letter to his wife, April 1915; as quoted in “Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries”, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 444.
- It is like a presentiment of the war, terrible and gripping; I can hardly realize that I painted it myself (remark on his painting ‘The fate of Animals’, fh). In the hazy photograph, at any rate, it has an indefinable reality that quite made my flesh creep. It is artistically logical to paint such paintings ‘before’ a war, not as stupid reminiscences ‘after’ a war. (Marc was soldier in World War 1, as also Macke, Kirchner and Beckmann tell in their quotes, fh). For one should paint constructive, prophetic pictures, not souvenirs, as is the usual fashion. And those are all I have in mind. It used to puzzle me sometimes, but now I know why it has to be like that. But these old pictures (his own paintings, he made before the War, fh) from the autumn Salon are sure to be resurrected again…
* Franz Marc, his quote from: a letter to his wife, from the Western front, 17 April, 1915; as quoted in ”Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock – ”, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 445.
- The day is not far distant on which Europeans – the few Europeans who will still remain – will suddenly become painfully aware of their lack of formal concepts. Then will these unhappy people bewail their wretched state and become seekers after form. They will not seek the new form in the past, in the outward world, or in the stylized appearances of nature, but they will build up their form from within themselves, in the light of their new knowledge that turned the old world fable into a world form, and the old world view into a world insight. (at the World War 1. front, near Verdun, 1915, fh).
* quote on art in general in Europe: ‘Aphorisms’, Franz Marc; as quoted in “Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries”, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, pp. 445-446.
- The art of the future will give form to our scientific convictions; this is our religion and our truth, and it is profound and weighty enough to produce the greatest style and the greatest revaluation of form that the world has ever seen. Today, instead of using the laws of nature as a means of artistic expression, we pose the religious problems of a new content. The art of our time will surely have profound analogies with the art of primitive periods long past., without, of course, the formalistic similarities now senselessly sought by many archaistic artists (Marc criticise abstraction ofCubism for instance, and rejected it firmly, fh). And our time will just as surely be followed in some distant, ripe, late European future by another period of cool maturity, which in its turn will again set up its own formal laws and traditions. (from the World War 1. front, near Verdun, 1915, fh.
* Franz Marc, quote: ‘Aphorisms’; as quoted in “Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries”, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 446.
links for more information and biography facts of Franz Marc & Blaue Reiter
* biography of Franz Marc on Wikipedia
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* gallery of paintings by Franz Marc
