Expressionism, which was at home in and around Munich and southern Germany, evolved out of artistic personalities with various temperaments. From a common intellectual viewpoint, they developed common goals. A cosmopolitan nature characterised the artists, who were of various nationalities. Munich was the German art metropolis at the turn of the century before 1912. Berlin developed into the centre of the new art as well. The city attracted painters and sculptors, and its museums attracted a large public. The groups of artists working in the city, and the pulsating artistic activity together with the famous Schwabing art festivals could stand the comparison to Paris. In addition to the academy and the school for fine arts, several private art schools had established themselves, for example the art school of Anton Azbé. Not having known each other previously, the two young Russians, Wassily Kandinsky and Alexej von Jawlensky, crossed paths there.
Kandinsky founded his own art group, Phalanx, and, in 1902, his own art school. In the meantime due to his rising reputation abroad, primarily in Paris, he soon belonged to the most well-known young painters of Munich. In the village-like seclusion of Murnau (with memories of Russian folk art) his paintings had a festive quality and exuded an expressive overabundance and as a result, the conservative Munich Secession denied him permission to exhibit. Consequently, in 1909, together with Jawlensky and his companion, Marianne von Werefkin, along with Adolf Erbslöh, Alexander Kanoldt, Alfred Kubin and Gabriele Münter, he founded the New Artists’ Association. Their first exhibition took place in December 1909 at the Galerie Thannhauser, and a second followed in September 1910, in which Fauvist and early Cubist works were exhibited. This persuaded Franz Marc and August Macke to join. However, the judging for the third exhibition in the autumn of 1911 became a scandal: Kandinsky’s paintings had distanced themselves ever more from the objective, which Erbslöh and Kanoldt resisted. The New Artists’ Association, which had attracted some attention and gained a place for itself in the art world, split up.
Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc founded the Blaue Reiter.They came up with the name, Kandinsky later reported, in the summerhouse in Sindelsdorf belonging to Franz Marc. ‘We both loved blue, Marc – horses, I – the rider. So the name came by itself.’ At first this name was just meant for the almanac, the ‘organ of all new and true ideas of our day.’ The almanac appeared in 1912 together with Kandinsky’s publishing About the Intellectual in Art.
Most of the artists of the New Artists’ Association spontaneously joined the editorial staff of the Blaue Reiter. Their memorable exhibition again took place in December 1911 at the Galerie Thannhauser. In addition, Heinrich Campendonk joined the group along with Robert Delaunay from Paris, who invited the two Russians, David and Vladimir Burliuk, as well as the composer, Arnold Schönberg. Even paintings by Henri Rousseau, the father of the Naïve painters, were on display, which one can explain by the preference of the young Munich artists for Bavarian folk art and verre églomisé pictures. Their second exhibition, showing watercolours, drawings and prints, was held at the Galerie Hanns Goltz in March 1912. Paul Klee also took part at this exhibition, and Lyonel Feininger first joined this exhibition in 1913. The core of the Blaue Reiter was, in addition to Kandinsky and Franz Marc, made up of the Russian Alexej von Jawlensky and his companion, the painter and Russian baroness, Marianne von Werefkin, Kandinsky’s student and subsequent companion, Gabriele Münter, as well as August Macke and Heinrich Campendonk. Lyonel Feininger, Adolf Erbslöh, Alexander Kanoldt, the draughtsman Alfred Kubin, the French Cubist Henri Le Fauconnier, Karl Hofer and the composer Arnold Schönberg.
A collective style, as was the case with the Brücke, was impossible with artists of such varying artistic background and temperament. Everyone accepted the individual creative development and means of expression of the others. Their artistic point of departure was a formal and philosophical one. It was about transcendence. For Kandinsky and Franz Marc, art was on the same plane as religious outlook. Art was ‘made out of inner necessity, coming forth from the emotional depths, and thus it was possible, to make the soul of the observer pulse.’ The thinking was oriented along the pantheistic lines of coming to terms with nature and the overcoming of the material and objective with the aim of discovering one’s own ego. They gave preference to colour harmony, to the dissection and analysis of forms, not to their fragmentation. Their basic philosophical orientation was to make out of the invisible and untouchable, out of pure and simple experiences, a visible and touchable reality, and this necessarily led to the nonrepresentational.
Franz Marc used the colour of the Fauves, the appreciation of objects from Cubism, and the dynamic elements of Futurism. He stressed what was already valid in the 19th century. In other words: detail, since as the expression has it, a part can mean more than the whole. His relationship with nature led to a new symbolic meaning for colours. In a bold move, he presented his depiction of his original concept of a living nature and the animal world. Wassily Kandinsky described his paintings, saying, ‘Marc is neither a painter of animals nor a naturalist nor a Cubist. In his paintings, the animals are so tightly fused into the landscape that despite the strength of expression, they are at the same time only an organic part of the whole.’
Franz Marc repeatedly reflected on his actions and desires in his painting:
I am looking to heighten my perception for the organic rhythm of all things. I seek to feel empathy in a pantheistic manner with the trembling and flowing of blood in nature, in the trees, in the animals, and in the air. I am looking to produce a painting with new movements and with colours that mock our old easel paintings.
Franz Marc, Fighting Shapes, 1914.
Oil on canvas, 91 × 131.5 cm. Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.
Alexej von Jawlensky, Fairytale Princess with a Fan, 1912.
Oil on cardboard, 65.5 × 54 cm. Gift of Günther and Carola Peill, Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
His painting, In the Rain, completed in 1912, shows the unity of all existence. The realism in the painting, the two squatting objects, the dog and the plants are partly unified and partly caught up in a network of iridescent rays of colour. It runs in a slanting manner like a carpet of colour over the canvas, sometimes in prism-like crystallisations. The viewer is presented a concrete representation of rain. This rain, however, is not a phenomenon that pours over the figures and nature; rather, it is an element that binds together and unites everything. In luminous colours, a strong red and a robust emerald green, Marc portrays the harmony of the ambience, and, now and again, white or violet shimmers through. Franz Marc dissolves the rigid organic form in dynamic surface movement. In his paintings this often result in a kaleidoscopic play of colour in which the still representational object is submerged and subordinated to the colourful structure.
Franz Marc succeeded with his efforts to integrate everything living and growing, resulting in the development of ever-larger experiments with shapes. The visit to the Erste Deutsche Herbstsalon in Berlin made a strong impression on him. He reported: ‘a significant preponderance [of] abstract shapes that only speak as shapes and almost without any representational overtones.’ Then he went on to anticipate his later non-representational creations: ‘All forms are memories.’ In December 1913, he painted the works Stables and Cattle. Here and there, cattle-shaped animal parts emerge as if from a bone-laden path. From an almost stereotypically fashioned layout, Marc created figures and animals as though moulded out of his brush. The contrast between the static and moving shapes conveys a unique shifting and vibrating effect.
During his lifetime, Marc was in search of an adequate way to represent the organic rhythm in a painting that encompasses and pervades all of existence. During this period of intensive development he realised his first non-representational painting, Fighting Forms. These compositions suffice to show the interplay of the organic and the rhythms that encompass all existence. Fighting Forms, as the title suggests, portrays a conflict between two coloured objects. The luminous red form with bizarrely shaped appendages falls with full force upon a blue – black self-contained form. In the dualism of the colours – here the red expansive power, there