Midweek pick-me-up: The blue horses of our destiny — artist Franz Marc, the wisdom of animals, and the triumph of beauty over brutality

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[FROM THE ARCHIVE | The Blue Horses of Our Destiny: Artist Franz Marc, the Wisdom of Animals, and the Triumph of Beauty Over Brutality]( you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” wrote Mary Oliver in [one]( of the masterpiece from her suite of poems celebrating the urgency of aliveness, [Blue Horses]( ([public library](. In the bleak winter of 1916, in the thickest darkness of World War I, several enormous canvases dappled in pointillist patterns of color appeared across the French countryside, as if Kandinsky or Klee had descended upon the war-torn hills to bandage the brutality with beauty. But no. The painted tarps were military camouflage, designed to conceal artillery from aerial observation — the work of the young German painter, printmaker, and Expressionist pioneer Franz Marc (February 8, 1880–March 4, 1916), who had devoted himself to parting the veil of appearances with art in order to “look for and paint this inner, spiritual side of nature.” Deer in a Monastery Garden, 1912. (Available [as a print]( and as [stationery cards]( Conscripted into the German Imperial Army at the outbreak of the war, midway through his thirties and just after a period of extraordinary creative fecundity, Marc found this improbable outlet for his artistic vitality during his military service. Unlikely to have had any practical advantage over ordinary camouflage, his colossal canvases are almost certain to have served as a psychological lifeline for the young artist drafted into the machinery of death. Within a month of painting them, Marc was dead — a shell explosion in the first days of the war’s longest battle sent a metal splinter into his skull, killing him instantly while a German government official was compiling a list of prominent artists to be recalled from military service as national treasures, with Marc’s name on it. The Fate of the Animals, 1913. Among the paintings he produced in those two ecstatically prolific years just before he was drafted was The Fate of the Animals — an arresting depiction of the interplay of beauty and brutality, terror and tenderness, in the chaos of life. An inscription appeared under the canvas in Marc’s hand: “And all being is flaming agony.” Destroyed in a warehouse fire in 1916, The Fate of the Animals was restored by Marc’s close friend [Paul Klee]( who painstakingly recreated the oil canvas from surviving photographs. The Tiger, 1912. (Available [as a print]( and as [stationery cards]( The Foxes, 1913. (Available [as a print]( and as [stationery cards]( Animals, Marc felt, were in many ways superior to humans — more honest in their expression of their inner truths, in more direct contact with the inner truths of nature: Animals with their virginal sense of life awakened all that was good in me. The Little Monkey, 1912. (Available [as a print]( The Large Blue Horses, 1911. (Available [as a print]( In 1910, just before he turned thirty, Marc became a founding member of The Blue Rider — a journal that became an epicenter of the German Expressionist community that included artists like Kandinsky, who had just formalized his thinking on [the role of the spiritual in art]( and Klee. At the end of that year, Marc began corresponding with the twenty-two-year-old writer and pianist Lisbeth Macke, who was married to one of the Blue Rider artists, about the relationship between color and emotion through the lens of music. Exactly a century after Goethe devised his [psychology of color and emotion]( Macke and Marc created a kind of synesthetic color wheel of tones, assigning sombre sounds to blue, joyful sounds to yellow, and a brutality of discord to red. Marc went on to ascribe not only emotional but spiritual attributes to the primary colors, writing to Macke: Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual. Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the colour which must be fought and vanquished by the other two! Further exploring the analogy between music and color, Marc envisioned the equivalent of music without tonality in painting — a sensibility where “a so-called dissonance is simply a consonance apart,” producing a harmonic effect in the overall composition, in color as in sound. The Tower of Blue Horses, 1913. (Available [as a print]( and as [stationery cards]( Twenty years after Marc’s death on the battlefields of the First World War, when the forces of terror that had fomented it festered into the Second, the Nazis declared his art “degenerate.” Many of his paintings went missing after WWII, last seen in a 1937 Nazi exhibition of “degenerate” art, alongside several of Klee’s paintings. Marc’s art is believed to have been seized by Nazi leaders for their personal theft-collections. An international search for his painting The Tower of Blue Horses has been underway for decades. In 2012, another of his missing paintings of horses was discovered in the Munich home of the son of one of Hitler’s art dealers, along with more than a thousand other artworks the Nazis denounced as “degenerate” in their deadly ideology but welcomed into their private living rooms as works of transcendent beauty and poetic power. The Dreaming Horses, 1913. (Available [as a print]( and as [stationery cards]( The title poem of Mary Oliver’s [Blue Horses]( embodies the original meaning of empathy, which became popular in the early twentieth century as [a term for projecting oneself into a work of art](. The poet projects herself into Marc’s painting The Large Blue Horses, running her hand gently one animal’s blue mane, letting another’s nose touch her gently, as she reflects on Marc’s tragic, tremendous life that managed to make such timeless portals into beauty and tenderness in the midst of unspeakable brutality: I do not know how to thank you, Franz Marc. Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving In 2022, I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian ([formerly Brain Pickings]( going. For sixteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable this year, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so [on this page](. KINDRED READINGS: [Otherness, Belonging, and the Web of Life: The Great Nature Writer Henry Beston on Our Fellow Creatures and the Dignity of Difference]( * * * [Dostoyevsky on Animal Rights and the Deepest Meaning of Human Love]( * * * [Art as Living Amends: Nick Cave on Creativity as an Instrument of Self-Forgiveness and the Necessity of Hope in a Fragile World]( * * * A SMALL, DELIGHTFUL SIDE PROJECT: [Uncommon Presents from the Past: Gifts for the Science-Lover and Nature-Ecstatic in Your Life, Benefitting the Nature Conservancy]( [---]( You're receiving this email because you subscribed on TheMarginalian.org (formerly BrainPickings.org). This weekly newsletter comes out each Wednesday and offers a hand-picked piece worth revisiting from my 15-year archive. The Marginalian MAIL NOT DELIVERED 47 Bergen Street, 3rd FloorBrooklyn, NY 11201 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](