Horse in a Landscape

Franz Marc had a close relationship to animals, especially horses. In meadows in the Upper Bavarian foothills near Kochel, Lenggries, and Sindelsdorf, in direct contact with animals, he made numerous paintings, studies, and drawings of them. He certainly did not see himself as a painter of animals in the academic tradition. Instead he was interested in a living being whose inner life he wished to depict in order to get closer to the secret of life. Animals in a landscape were, for the artist, a bridge between man and nature, whose vanished unity he wished to restore. According to him, only animals had preserved a "chaste majesty." It was from this way of thinking that Marc developed an autonomy of color and form. The acutely angled body of the horse visible in the foreground and its head that is situated in the middle of the picture link with the landscape without horizon rising in the background to form a broad, intensive color scheme.