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Lot Essay
Despite the avant-garde influences which he readily absorbed during his trips to Paris before 1910, Marc felt that his painting lacked an essential unity. His friendship with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich helped him to integrate subject, form and color, and in January 1910, he met August Macke, who had already mastered the problem of color, with which Marc still struggled. In this dynamic environment, Marc's painting evolved quickly.
Marc met Robert Delaunay in 1912, as did Paul Klee and Macke, and under the influence of Delaunay, Kandinsky and the Futurists, Marc's art became progressively abstract. The present Abstraktes Aquarell II, from the artist's Skizzenbuch XXX, displays all three influences. The use of pure prismatic color, inter-woven forms and circular structures derive from Delaunay; the repetitive forms echo Futurism, and throughout Marc follows Kandinsky's example of abstaction of the object; in this case, a reference to the elongated form of a swan, heron or other bird, a symbol of prophecy and vision. In his abstract works Marc most clearly approaches his pantheistic ideals.
In early 1914, as Marc moved more deeply into non-objective painting, the angular, splintered shapes derived from Cubism and Futurism gave way to increasingly curvilinear forms. In his last paintings and drawings, executed after the outbreak of World War I, Marc sought to create an entirely organic, non-referential visual reality that expressed spirit, dynamism and flux, which stemmed from an intense romantic idealism and an optimistically transcendent belief in the breakthrough to a new world. At the same time, however, seen in the context of a global cataclysm, they possess a sinister quality in which monumental, impersonal forces irrevocably alter the human and natural landscape, purging it of subject and figurative form, which had been an essential characteristic of European art for centuries.
As with Macke, one can only speculate how Marc's art would have further evolved; he tragically met his death on the front lines near Verdun on 4 March 1916, at age thirty-six.
Marc met Robert Delaunay in 1912, as did Paul Klee and Macke, and under the influence of Delaunay, Kandinsky and the Futurists, Marc's art became progressively abstract. The present Abstraktes Aquarell II, from the artist's Skizzenbuch XXX, displays all three influences. The use of pure prismatic color, inter-woven forms and circular structures derive from Delaunay; the repetitive forms echo Futurism, and throughout Marc follows Kandinsky's example of abstaction of the object; in this case, a reference to the elongated form of a swan, heron or other bird, a symbol of prophecy and vision. In his abstract works Marc most clearly approaches his pantheistic ideals.
In early 1914, as Marc moved more deeply into non-objective painting, the angular, splintered shapes derived from Cubism and Futurism gave way to increasingly curvilinear forms. In his last paintings and drawings, executed after the outbreak of World War I, Marc sought to create an entirely organic, non-referential visual reality that expressed spirit, dynamism and flux, which stemmed from an intense romantic idealism and an optimistically transcendent belief in the breakthrough to a new world. At the same time, however, seen in the context of a global cataclysm, they possess a sinister quality in which monumental, impersonal forces irrevocably alter the human and natural landscape, purging it of subject and figurative form, which had been an essential characteristic of European art for centuries.
As with Macke, one can only speculate how Marc's art would have further evolved; he tragically met his death on the front lines near Verdun on 4 March 1916, at age thirty-six.