Lot 12 Dα

“Is there a more mysterious idea for an artist than that of how nature is reflected in the eye of an animal? How is the world seen by a horse – or an eagle, a deer or a dog? How impoverished and soulless our convention of simply placing animals in a landscape […]” (cited in Magdalena M. Moeller, Franz Marc, Stuttgart 1989, p. 33). Franz Marc formulated these thoughts on the depiction of animals around the end of 1911 or beginning of 1912, that is, in the period when our pencil drawing was created. Around 1912 he had reached a point in his development as an artist where he was no longer concerned with capturing the essence of an animal and wished, instead, to utilise the achievements of French cubism to merge the animal and its surroundings into a unified entity through cubic and crystalline forms.
The pencil drawing here, “Esel in stilisierter Landschaft”, is a carefully executed work from Marc's Sketchbook XXV from the estate of Maria Marc. The drawing could have been created in connection with the “Eselfries” of 1911 or (more probably) the lost painting “Große Landschaft mit Pferden und Eseln” (1911/12). While the ass is depicted from a different perspective in the latter painting, the position of a horse and the mountain chain in the background are quite comparable. Even in this little drawing, it becomes evicent that Marc has developed the mountains’ peaks out of the angular forms of the animal’s body, resulting in the ass’s complete incorporation into its surroundings.