Franz Marc’s ‘Tiger’
This 1912 painting of a tiger is typical of Marc’s style and would influence Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Cubism, and much of European Modernism that would follow ‘between the wars’.
Along with his friend Wassily Kandisnky, Franz Marc was a founder member of the hugely important and influential group of artists collectively known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) — a fairly loose association of several pioneering international artists who were united by the importance they placed upon colour and a belief that visual art could transcend cultural and political boundaries.
They also represent a return to the sensibilities of the Romantic Movement in thinking that art could directly address and affect our emotional and spiritual faculties. Marc’s Tiger is quite possibly a nod to William Blake’s illuminated poem, The Tyger (1794), recognising that Romantic lineage.
Franz Marc saw colours not only as an expressive element in painting, but as representing various universal principals that were either in conflict or in harmony. He believed that painting was a spiritual act and a form of transcendence and, as a student of theology, saw art as a combination of human, animal, nature, the spiritual and the scientific. In…
