Franz Marc the Little Mountain

Franz Marc

The Little Mountain Goats

Franz Marc: Art analysis of the Little Mountain Goats

Franz Marc: Art analysis of the Little Mountain Goats

Early 20th century German artist Franz Marc is usually classified as a German Expressionist, although the vast majority of his works has a more literal and concrete quality than his contemporaries' art. "He found a way of giving the German Romantic painters - Runge, Friedrich, Kobell, Blechen, Rethel and Schwind (all of whom he warmly admired) a new and modern guise" (Lucie-Smith 1999, p.72). The Little Mountain Goats, (1914) as showcased in the St. Louis Art Museum is one of his more abstract oil paintings. More typical of the artist's early style is Cat on a Yellow Cushion (1912) and Dog Lying in the Snow (1910). The Little Mountain Goats (oil on canvas, 23 7/8 x 16 in.) reflects a new direction for the artist in his work, although Marc never espoused an urge to completely and radically break with the artistic past until the end of his career -- as a young man he continued to admire the Romantics and sought to reconfigure Romanticism anew. One of his final and most famous works is The Fate of the Animals (1913). This work unfurls in a series of splinters of colors that are simultaneously representational of animals yet wild and unnatural in both their coloring and their shapes.

Tragically, however, what the full flowering of Marc's mature career would resemble is unknown: Marc was conscripted as a soldier in World War I. Unlike some other artists, he did not actively seek out military service and his name was supposed to be withdrawn from the ranks of those men on active duty but on "March 1916 he was killed instantly when he was struck in the head by a shell splinter" while on patrol (Lucie-Smith 1999, p.72). Until his death, he was a member of what became one of the most influential movements in 20th century art.

Expressionism was not limited to the plastic arts. It stressed the need for artists to express themselves in their works in a highly personalized fashion and often involved the use of broad brushstrokes and strong colors. Marc became an Expressionist gradually -- his early career involved a great deal of failed experimentation. Marc, as a young man, was often mired in depression, despite the fact that he had a promising beginning for an artist: Marc's father was a professional landscape painter. But his childhood was also shaped by the worldview of his Calvinist mother (Lucie-Smith 1999, p.72). Marc struggled to find his creative voice and found some inspiration upon discovering the Impressionists in a trip to Paris. The Post-Impressionists Vincent Van Gough and particularly Paul Gauguin were to have the greatest impact upon his early efforts.

As evidenced not only in The Little Mountain Goats but indeed all of Marc's work, Marc was fascinated by animal's shapes and ways of moving. He "said that he wanted to recreate them 'from the inside', and made himself so complete a master of animal anatomy that he was able to give lessons in the subject" which allowed him to earn some additional income (Lucie-Smith 1999, p.1). The influence of this detailed study of animal anatomy is also reflected in Marc's choice of subjects, from goats to dogs to cats to horses and also works featuring animals with which he was not immediately familiar -- Marc did not live in a rural setting, and did not use animals to give a sense of place or pastoral peace. Rather, animal figures such as the goats were used as a vehicle of interior expression for the artist. The obscurity of the goats behind lines and colors, their indeterminacy create a kind of whirlwind of confusion, rather than a clearly pastoral scene, as might be expected by the work's title.

Marc's output as a whole was influenced by Paul Gauguin's study of jungle animals, such as tigers and panthers. Marc, although he never lived south of the equator, also painted creatures clearly inspired by Gauguin as in The Fate of the Animals (1913). Once again, art and technical knowledge of anatomy was his inspiration rather than something he witnessed from real life. His use of expressionism is evident in the ways that he used his interior consciousness to realize his artistic objective. The Little Mountain Goats is a dizzying smear of motion and color. Its kinesthetic sensibility and paler color palate recalls Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase more than any of Gauguin's works, suggesting a new influence upon Marc's style. The triangular features of the goats, the geometric primary colors, particularly the unnatural yet earthy tones of the reds and pinks, along with the whites and greens clearly show an evolution in his philosophy, which must be also partially ascribed to the Fauves. Fauvist works used stirring and unusual colors and bold brushstrokes and lack the clearer and more defined lines of Gauguin. Rather appropriately, given Marc's frequent subject matter, the word 'Fauve' in French means 'wild beast.'

Over the course of his career, Marc became personally acquainted with both Henri Matisse and Wassily Kandinsky, the latter of whom was one of the founders of the Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen (NKVM: New Artists' Association of Munich), which offered cutting-edge artists an alternative to established exhibition venues in Germany (Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen, 2009, Ketterer Kunst). Marc defended the Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen exhibition in print when it was attacked by more traditional artists, but he later split with the movement. By this time "he had formed his own set of artistic principles, which were a mixture of Romanticism, Expressionism and Symbolism: In December 1910 he wrote a famous letter to [August] Macke, assigning emotional values to colors:

Blue is the male principle, astringent and spiritual. Yellow is the female principle, gentle, gay and spiritual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the color to be opposed and overcome by the other two" (Lucie-Smith 1999, p.73). The Little Mountain Goats is a collage of all of these colors -- the gentle yellow in the foreground, blue in the background, with swaths of red at war with the other shades. These competing colors further add to the sense of motion in the work, making the smears of the brush look like the dancing of goats upon a mountain.

In 1911 Marc "found himself ready to embark on the series of paintings of animals which have since been the cornerstone of his reputation. And in December, after a split in the Neue Kuenstlervereinigung, organized the first Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) exhibition…In 1913 he took an important role in selecting and hanging Der Sturm's First Autumn Salon in Berlin, and noted how many of the exhibitors were veering towards abstraction…By the spring Of 1914 Marc's own work had become virtually abstract," until his life was cut short by the war (Lucie-Smith 1999, p.73). Up to his death, Marc continued to write treatises upon the philosophy of art. By the time he composed The Little Mountain Goats, his work had become less about beauty and color alone and had been grounded in a deeper fascination with the purpose of arts.