Franz Marc: Seeing Through it All
The famous painter of colourful animals hoped to find the essence of all things beyond the wonderful illusion of our world.
Franz Marc predominantly painted animals. Or to be precise, he animalised his paintings. His art was driven by a philosophical exploration of nature and by interrogating the nature of reality itself.
As I understand it, Marc was beginning to build upon the concept of animism — that all things have within them an animating spirit. However, he was pushing past this notion toward a belief that these spirits were actually facets of one ‘unifying spirit’, of which we were once also a part.
Franz Marc felt that animals were closer to this unifying spirit than humans, who had drifted further away from the primordial essence. He also found that painting animals made him much happier than painting fellow humans. He wondered why this should be so.
When he painted an animal, he was not painting any particular individual. After initial studies to understand the underlying forms, he would paint his animals without using a model. He saw his designs as totemic and thought of his animals in terms of iconography rather than representation — perhaps more like the animals in prehistoric cave paintings.
