Lot 50 Dα

Franz Marc's Sketchbook XXIII, which was created in 1910/11 and was later broken up, brought together an abundance of outstanding drawings dealing with Arcadian motifs featuring animals and nudes in nature - a dominant theme in his works from this period. Most of the figures are depicted in motion and from unusual perspectives; their harmonious integration into the natural setting is characteristic. Setting out from observations of nature, Marc sought to combine colour and form into a unity and to transfer this into a timeless, spiritualised context. “But we should seek nothing except expression in the picture; the picture is a cosmos subject to entirely different laws than nature; nature is lawless, because infinite, an infinite contiguity and sequentiality. Our spirit creates narrow, stringent laws for itself, which enable it to depict an infinite nature. The stricter the laws, the more they will ignore the 'means' of nature, which have nothing to do with art”, wrote Marc to his wife Maria in February 1911 (cited in: Franz Marc. Die Retrospektive, exh. cat. Lenbachhaus Munich 2005/2006, pp. 28f.). The pyramidal composition of the present drawing, which is from the previously mentioned sketchbook, includes three nude figures and a horse as well as an additional reclining nude embedded within the foreground. It is no coincidence that the drawing recalls the tectonically constructed groups of figures characteristic of Hans von Marées's work. Franz Marc had gone to the major memorial exhibition presented in Munich in 1908 and, like other contemporary artists, such as Oskar Schlemmer and Max Beckmann, Marées's work made a great impression on him. “He studied the classicist tectonics of the figures intensely and used them for his own artistic abbreviations, with which he articulated his studies of movement in his drawings in particular. He understood Marées in terms of an exemplar who helped him to distance himself from plein-air painting” (Wilfried F. Schoeller, Franz Marc. Biografie, Munich 2017, p. 116).