Lot 252 Dα

“My aims do not lie along the lines of a specific animal painting. I seek a good, pure and bright style in which at least a part of what modern painters have to say to me can become completely assimilated. And this might perhaps be a sense for the organic rhythm of all things, a pantheistic empathy projecting into the trembling and trickling of the blood of nature, in the trees, in the animals, in the air [...].” (Franz Marc: Schriften, ed. by Klaus Lankheit, Köln 1978, p. 98).
In the years 1912 to 1915 Franz Marc constantly continued to develop the degree of abstraction in the form and content of his art and, in doing so, found his way to an ever more intimate, indissoluble linking of nature and creation. Marc's process of abstraction had very different points of reference in this context, for example, the work of Wassily Kandinsky and August Macke, Boccioni's Futurism or the Orphic Cubism of Robert Delaunay. At the same time it is striking that, alongside his images of animals and people, only a very limited portion of his works are depictions of landscapes. However, it is precisely Marc's landscape formations which are often to be understood as particularly radical formal abbreviations of organic and inorganic fragments (see Andrea Firmenich, Landschaft, Natur, Kosmos, Geist: Zur Entwicklung der Landschaft bei Franz Marc, in: exhib. cat. Franz Marc: Kräfte der Natur; Werke 1912-1915, Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst München and Westfälisches Landesmuseum Münster 1993/1994, pp. 87 ff.). In its minimal use of colour and cool tonality the “Abstrakte Baumstudie”, which is fractalised through a series of triangular formations, stirs associations with the secluded, dark depths of the forest, though not without recalling the animation specific to nature - in the little red note of colour at the bottom right. Here, in his search for the incomprehensible and occult qualities of creation, Marc has arrived at a powerful and expressive study of nature displaying a remarkable dynamism.