Franz Marc’s pantheistic color woodcut The Birth of Horses (Geburt der Pferde) is one of the most important prints produced by the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider), an Expressionist group that Marc cofounded with Wassily Kandinsky and others in Munich in 1911. Marc’s dynamic composition conveys his view of nature as a communion of spiritual forces most strongly sensed, and embodied, by animals. Although the work includes the discernible outline of a horse, as a whole it delights in the abstract, with strong lines cutting across the composition, breaking it into segments filled with a vibrant palette of oranges, reds, and greens. Marc died tragically in World War I, cutting short what might have been a brilliant career, though his efforts lived on through Kandinsky, who was beginning to develop his own language of pure abstraction inspired by the synesthetic experience of music.
The Birth of Horses also speaks to the mutually influential relationship between German Expressionism and Italian Futurism. Critic Adolf Behne, writing in the avant-garde magazine Der Sturm (The Storm), observed that the Futurists were “not so much interested in depicting the unfolding of external movement as in the inner vitality of the motion inherent in . . . objects.” This reading implicitly linked the Futurists and Expressionists, who were similarly invested in capturing the dynamism of people, places, and things “by means of a compression and a concentration on the essential and an elimination of everything unimportant!” While the Futurists were obsessed with the speed and motion of modern technology, Marc and other Expressionists stripped compositions down to their bare elements of line, form, and color in order to convey the sheer, unadulterated energy of nature.
Andrea Gyorody
2017
