Lot 209 Dα

Both Sketchbook XXV - used by Franz Marc in 1912 and later broken up by Maria Marc and Otto Stangl - and the outstanding, fully accomplished work “Rote Jünglinge” taken from it are remarkable for the almost continuous oval composition within which the depictions of animals and human figures are embedded: pairs of cows and polar bears turning towards one another, horses and deer standing opposite one another with their necks laid together or monkeys playing with each other - always surrounded by stylised vegetation and rock formations (see comparative illus.).
Whereas these compositions are of a character that seems almost ornamental and are defined by great harmony, “Rote Jünglinge” is additionally characterised by a dynamism expressed in the interplay of forces and the physical tension of diagonally extended bodies as well as in the application of the colours red and black.
“The presentation of the art [...] of Marc from 1912 onwards remains incomplete without reference to Robert Delaunay's work. Examples of his painting - works from the series of Eiffel towers, the cityscapes and the church of Saint-Séverin - were seen by Macke and Marc at the first collective exhibition of the Blauer Reiter in 1911/12, and they visited the French artist together in Paris in early October of 1912.” (Volker Adolphs, Die Auseinandersetzung mit der Moderne: Kubismus, Futurismus, Orphismus, Abstraktion, in: exhib. cat. Bonn/Munich 2014, August Macke - Franz Marc, Eine Künstlerfreundschaft, p. 230).
The new impulses emerging from Delaunay's Orphism reveal themselves in Franz Marc's work in the increasing abstraction of forms and a turn towards bolder colour, as is shown by the 1912 sketchbook and the “Rote Jünglinge” offered here.