Franz Marc horses

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“ During the early years of the 20th century,

German painter Franz Marc devoted much of his

artistic energy to creating images of horses and

other animals. The allure of animals was not,

for Marc, simply a formal or zoological interest,

but stemmed from a deep fascination with the

dynamic connection between animals, humans,

and the natural world they shared. Longing to

understand the spirit driving his own being,

Marc looked to the horse in nature to perceive

what he could not recognize in the human

world. Through radical compositions and bold

experiments with color, he strove to express

the primary energy of the animals

( Portrait by Auguste Macke)

Marc often depicted animals in non-naturalistic colours.

He developed his own colour theory and symbolism,

which equated the three primary colours with qualities

and emotions. In its simplest terms, Marc associated blue

with masculinity, and red and yellow with femininity since

they are more earthy colours, but he also associated

yellow with joy and happiness. Blue was viewed by Marc

throughout his career to be the most deeply spiritual of

the three colours. His decision to apply non-

representational colours to animals could perhaps have

been an attempt at stepping away from the material

world and identifying the need to use non-worldly

colours in order to portray the spiritual. In a letter to

Macke dating from 1910, Marc states that yellow is

associated with femininity and happiness, while red is

associated with "matter" and is considered by him in

Texts and images: on the Web Audio: Mozart, Violin Sonata 8