Gentle Expressionist

Oberleutnant Franz Marc, artillery observer in the Kaiser's Fifth Army, stood tall, handsome and sad one day in early March 1916 in a hush of the great battle for Verdun. "One chews constantly," he had written his wife, "on that ever more baffling riddle: how this war is possible." He had spoken of living on three levels: soldierly, meditative and creative. Soldiering was to him "a complete dream act." Meditating was "perhaps closer to true experience." Creating was "an unconscious growing and going towards a goal, the sprouting of art ... a seed that one must not grasp rudely." Now he was 36. and in the final hour of his life. A shrapnel burst from French guns crushed the seed forever.

A sketchbook was found with Marc's body, and in the sketchbook were 35 exquisite drawings no bigger than his hand. The drawings were sent to Marc's widow, who kept them until her death last year. Last week, in Munich's Graphische Sammlung, they were shown publicly for the first time.

Inward from War. The drawings were obviously studies for paintings Marc hoped to make some day. Each was a fully thought out composition and had been executed with an extraordinary mingling of boldness and delicacy. They showed that Marc was still moving towards abstraction, might eventually have grown as abstract as his friends Kandinsky and Paul Klee.

Wrote Munich's Sueddeutsche Zeitung: "Nothing about them suggests the milieu in which they were born ... in the midst of war and destruction Franz Marc's gaze turned inward . . . from crystalline lines he lets the Birth of a Cicada come into being. Animals appear: deer, horses . . . and the feather-light body of a swallow . . . Already far away from presenting the material, the visible, the drawings try to grasp a spiritual reality and make the objects transparent."

Marc had gone far, and fast, beyond his beginnings in art. A student of the Munich Academy, he once recalled that "the artistic desert of the 19th century was our nursery." He escaped the desert via Paris, went home full of the doings of the Fauves and cubists. In 1911 he joined with Klee and Kandinsky to found a group of equal importance called Der Blaue Reiter.

Members of The Blue Rider aspired to nothing less than painting the essence of things. They put feeling first, faithfulness to nature or to formal conventions last. They were the clear, sweet dawn of German expressionism, a school that later languished from too much heaviness, bitterness and swagger. *

Outward to Humanity. Marc loathed conflict of any kind. Man, being a creature in and of conflict, therefore revolted him. "Early in my life," he once explained to his wife, "I found man ugly, and animals seemed to me lovelier and purer; but even in them I discovered so much conflict [that] my representations became even more schematic and abstract." Marc's method was to bind the animals he painted into strong, elaborately rhythmical compositions. That made them seem atone with their environment, which was the state he himself longed for. He transformed their animality with flashing colors; a horse might be sky blue or fire red.

Though he seemed to have remained unaware of the fact, Marc's animals were projections of human ideals: deer were tender, cows serene and tigers courageous. A critic described Marc as "the man who could still understand the speech of animals." On the contrary, as his sketchbook proved afresh, he knew the prayers of the soul.

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