Franz Marc is a legend: his tragic life story, his extraordinary artistic talent, his visionary spirit, and his early death in World War I. Marc died in 1916 at the age of just 36 near Verdun, but his outstanding importance for the art of the “Blue Rider” and German Expressionism had already been established by that point.
Shortly before the founding of the “Blauer Reiter" in 1909/10, Marc's depictions of animals and landscapes, which celebrated the purity of nature, gave way to his characteristic motifs of a paradisiacal and threatened symbiosis of flora and fauna. He ultimately pushed the idea to the extreme in his famous, expressionist dissections of blue, yellow, and green horses. It is his most progressive and most renowned motif, which Marc first realized in 1911, the year the “Blauer Reiter” was founded. It is also particularly exemplary of Marc's courageous transition from object color to expressionist expressive color, which can be freely assigned to the object, depending solely on the artist's desire for expression. On the way there, Marc's painting underwent a rapid development in just a few years. The two years before the formation of "Der Blaue Reiter" were particularly seminal for what was to follow between 1911 and the outbreak of World War I. And so it was in his animal and landscape paintings created in 1909 and 1910, in particular, that Marc achieved a thematic and compositional density that was to have a decisive influence on his visionary, expressionist compositions from the time of the “Blauer Reiter.” The view into the dense branches of the forest, which Marc paints on canvas in expressive pastel colors in the present “Verschneiter Wald” (Snowy Forest), is deep and focused. The tree trunks glow in light green and purple against the brilliant white of the snow. Despite the figurative subject matter, the extreme close-up and cropped composition create an almost abstract, dynamic line structure. The captivating effect that characterizes "Verschneiter Wald" to this day is surprisingly modern and colorful. In 1913, Marc made significant contributions to the famous Expressionist exhibition at Herwarth Walden's First German Autumn Salon in Berlin, submitting a total of seven paintings, including the well-known work "Tierschicksale" (Animal Fates, 1913). The painting portrays two fleeing green horses and a rearing blue deer in a prism-like forest scene. Shortly after the outbreak of war, Marc volunteered for military service in August 1914. Like many other artists and intellectuals, he believed that the war would have a cleansing and healing effect on “a sick Europe.” However, when Marc held a postcard with a picture of his “Tierschicksale” in his hands during the war, he wrote to his wife: "I was deeply moved and agitated by this sight. It was a premonition of this war, dreadful and touching; I can hardly imagine that I painted it!" (Susanna Partsch, Marc, p. 76; in: Klaus Lankheit and Uwe Steffen (eds.), Franz Marc: Briefe aus dem Feld, Munich 1986, p. 50). [JS]