Franz Marc’s iconic painting may have survived
The Blue Horses painting that was thought to be destroyed by the Nazi may have survived WWII.
We are always very happy to talk about art and blue horses — better if feral — but this time we are even happier.
Franz Marc’s “The Tower of Blue Horses (1913)” has been missing since the end of the WWII, but it may have survived, hidden in Russia, away from the Nazi frenzy.
The painting has not been seen in public since a 1937 exhibition of “degenerate” art in Munich, but the curators of two shows opening in Germany this month believe that it is possible that it has survived.
They are organising their exhibitions both as an homage to the lost masterpiece and as a way to raise public awareness of the painting’s disappearance.
Marc painted the work just before WWI. Six years later, it was acquired by Berlin’s Nationalgalerie. The Blaue Reiter group, led by Marc and the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, regarded blue as a spiritual colour and admired riders and horses.
Marc’s work was declared “degenerate” by the Nazis in 1936, and the following year, The Tower of Blue Horses was showcased in the famous Munich exhibition. The choice led to protests from war veterans because Marc had died when fighting for Germany during WWI. The painting was then withdrawn from the show.
After Germany’s defeat in 1945, the picture went missing. Curators do believe that it was not destroyed because of a number of reports of sightings. Edwin Redslob, art historian and pre-WWII head of the Nazi’s culture agency, wrote many years later that he had in fact seen the painting in early 1945 in the Haus am Waldsee, the Berlin villa occupied by the chief of the Nazi’s film organisation. In 1961, the journalist Joachim Nawrocki reported having seen the painting in the winter of 1948–49 in what once was the home of the police chief Graf von Helldorf. In 2001, the German collector Jan Ahlers said that he had received an offer regarding the sale of the painting, although he said he had not seen the work.
Katja Blomberg is the organiser of the half of the exhibition on the painting that will be held in Berlin. She believes that the canvas was probably seized by Soviet troops after the end of WWII and brought to Russia. It may still be there, hidden in a museum store. Michael Hering, the curator of the other half of the show (which will be held in Munich), agrees, adding that “another possibility is that it is in a cellar or an attic in Germany”.
The exhibition, which will present contemporary artists’ responses to Marc’s masterpiece, takes place in two appropriate venues: the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich and the Haus am Waldsee in the south-west suburbs of Berlin. Viktoria Binschtok and Norbert Bisky are among the 20 contemporary artists who have been invited to respond to the painting, its history, and its status.
