Horses in landscape

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Horses in Landscape , Study, 1911 (The format of the paper is cropped in this illustration.)

Horses in countryside is a 1911 created watercolor pencil on paper of the expressionist painter Franz Marc . It is probably a study for the painting The Great Blue Horses , which was thought to be lost. The picture became known worldwide in the press and on television on the occasion of the Schwabing art discovery in November 2013. It was one of the first eleven works to be shown at a press conference by the Augsburg public prosecutor's office. The small-format work measures 12.1 × 19.6 cm.

description

The three horses in the study, painted in a sideways position or from behind, have brown-blue tones. They stand with their heads bowed to the left in front of a mountainous landscape, which is vaulted by a sky with white clouds. The outlines of the horses reflect the mountains. The two knotless little tree trunks in the foreground and background, which appear like a diagonal, are striking. The front trunk is touched by the horse in the foreground. The watercolor is done on brown paper, its edges appear irregular on the ground. It is signed on the left edge of the picture without specifying the year.

The Great Blue Horses , 1911, in the collection of the Walker Art Center , Minneapolis since 1942

The famous Marc work from the same year, The Big Blue Horses , created after the study in oil on canvas , has the dimensions 106 × 181 cm and shows the same motif, only the colors have changed significantly. The horse's body is a strong blue, the landscape and sky have red and purple tones that do not correspond to reality. The paintings Blue Horse I and Blue Horse II were also created in 1911 . In all of the horse pictures of this time, Marc turns blue from an “appearance color” to an “essential color”. The color blue stood for the male principle in his own color theory. With the animal image he found a symbol for a "spiritualization of the world". Like the blue flower of romanticism, the blue horses express the search for redemption from earthly heaviness and material bondage. In 1913 he created the painting The Tower of the Blue Horses , again with blue horses as a motif , whose whereabouts have been unknown since 1945.

Provenance

On 5 November 2013 a televised press conference on was Schwabing Art Fund by art historian Meike Hoffmann alongside Max Liebermann's two riders on the beach , and nine other examples the lost study on the Big blue horses from 1911, entitled Landscape with Horses shown . Like the other examples shown, it comes from the collection of the art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt , which is inherited from his son Cornelius Gurlitt . The public prosecutor's office in Augsburg , headed by Reinhard Nemetz , already confiscated his collection in February 2012. The case was made public in a report by Focus magazine on November 3, 2013.

The former owner of the plant until 1937 was the Moritzburg Art and Industry Museum in Halle (Saale) , and it was acquired by its director Max Sauerlandt in 1914 . A former employee of the museum recognized the colored paper work, which had previously only been documented in black and white. The Expressionist work was considered " degenerate " in National Socialist Germany , was removed from the museum by confiscation and came into the possession of Hildebrand Gurlitt. The museum in Moritzburg will endeavor to return it.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See recording
  2. ↑ As a watercolor referred to in the database confiscation inventory "Degenerate Art", other sources such as the Monopol-Magazin (footnote 6) referred to the work as gouache .
  3. ^ Provenance Research Project - Franz Marc: The Large Blue Horses ( Memento June 14, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), walkerart.org, accessed on December 11, 2013
  4. ^ Hajo Düchting: The Blue Rider . Taschen, Cologne 2009, ISBN 978-3-8228-5577-5 , p. 46
  5. ^ Nazi looted art: Marc watercolor comes from Moritzburg Halle , Mitteldeutsche Zeitung , November 5, 2013, accessed on December 7, 2013
  6. ^ The publicly shown works from the Gurlitt collection in: Monopol , November 5, 2013, accessed on December 7, 2013