Kelly Richman

October 2015

Prompt:

Suggest comparative images for Franz Marc’s Deer in the Woods II, 1911.

Franz Marc and Modernism:

Contextualising Deer in the Woods II within Twentieth-Century Art

‘Is there a more mysterious idea for an artist than the conception of how nature is

mirrored in the eyes of an animal? How does a horse see the world, or an eagle, or a doe, or a

dog?”1 – Franz Marc

Created at the height of the heavily saturated and deeply stylised Expressionist

Movement, Franz Marc’s Deer in the Woods II, 1911 (Figure 1) is equally a depiction of its

animal subject as it is a hint toward abstraction. Portraying a single, slumbering deer amid rolling

rainbow hills and starkly contrasted trees, Deer in the Woods II is one of many paintings

completed by Marc that portray flora and fauna as his muse and “draw the viewer into the world

of their animal protagonists.”2 While undeniably a Marc creation, Deer in the Woods II also

aesthetically speaks to the work of other twentieth-century artists who preceded, followed, and

even worked contemporaneously beside him. In order to trace the stylistic similarities and artistic

considerations throughout the Modern Art movement, it is worth comparing this piece to the

work of three renowned artists: Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin, fellow Expressionist Wassily

Kandinsky, and post-war Colour Field painter Helen Frankenthaler.

Comprised of blended forms and evoking a dreamlike atmosphere, Deer in the Woods II

combines recognizable subjects with seemingly arbitrary blocks of colour. In the foreground, a

yellow deer curls up in the grass; with her head folded atop her body, she is a sleek form among

planes of hazy hues. Before her sits the painting’s only other recognizable form: a suspended tree

branch. In the background, planes of orange, yellow, pink, purple, green, and white ground the

scene. Indistinguishable, abstract foliage frames the composition, and contrasting colours suggest

depth by receding into darkness. While the bright and bold doe-in-the-trees motif is repeatedly

revisited by Marc – as evident in The Red Deer, 1912 (Figure 2) and Deer in the Forest, 1914

(Figure 3) – the piece’s woodland theme and exaggerated use of colour also convey a strong

likeness to another well-known artist: Paul Gauguin.

A key figure of the Post-Impressionist movement, Gauguin is known for his artificial

colour palette and the primitive documentation of his mid-life exotic escape. While portrayals of

the beautiful Tahitian people – namely, of his young bride – most famously comprise his oeuvre,

Gauguin was also deeply inspired by the untouched local landscape. In Marquesan Landscape

                                                                                                               1 Elizabeth H. Payne, ‘Animals in Landscape’, Bulletin Of The Detroit Institute Of Arts, vol. 36, no. 3, 1956-1957, p. 75. 2 Susanna Partsch, Franz Marc: 1880-1916, Taschen, 2001, p. 37.

with Horses, 1901 (Figure 4), the artist portrays the lush foliage and roaming wildlife of the

French Polynesian islands, as two horses are shown grazing upon purple grass under the shade of

a multi-coloured canopy. With nearly identical colour palettes and a shared regard for wild

nature, Deer in the Woods II and Marquesan Landscape with Horses are clearly comparable.

While, as a Post-Impressionist, Gauguin hardly dabbled in abstraction, he, on the heels of

Impressionism and the brink of Fauvism, was undeniably moving toward the style, as – just a

decade later – it would play a key role in the work of Marc and his Expressionist contemporaries,

like Wassily Kandinsky.

A pioneer of abstraction, Russian-born Kandinsky is renowned for his exuberant use of

colour and innate interest in the relationship between line, shape, and space. Along with Marc,

Kandinsky was a key member of Der Blaue Reiter group, an avant garde assembly of

Expressionist artists founded in 1911. Like Gauguin, Kandinsky and Der Blaue Reiter group

“tended to pursue a kind of a spirituality or transcendence seeming to offer itself in the

unexploited mythopoetic integrity of primitive art.”3 With a focus on ethereality and intrinsic

spontaneity, Kandinsky’s Murnau with a Church, 1910 (Figure 5) illustrates the Der Blaue Reiter

group’s distinctive aesthetic and, unsurprisingly, bears striking similarities to Deer in the Woods

II. Like Marc’s piece, Murnau with a Church – with its quick brushstrokes and pieced together

planes of colour – embodies the impulsive, seemingly arbitrary style favoured by the group.

Furthermore, like Deer in the Woods II, Kandinsky’s piece merges absolute abstraction with a

recognizable subject: in this case, the erect steeple of a church. While the latter’s colour palette is

more vivid and varied, both pieces feature blended, almost watercolour-like patches of unnatural

tones. Furthermore, unlike Kandinsky’s well-known later work, Murnau with a Church does not

feature black outlines, geometric shapes, or a stark backdrop; it demonstrates, rather, an

undeniable relationship to the distinctive style of his contemporaries – including, of course, Marc.

In addition to his predecessors and peers, Marc also evidently had a similar style and

aesthetic to modern artists to follow – including American painter Helen Frankenthaler. Not

typically compared to the primitive Expressionists, Frankenthaler worked in post-war abstraction.

A prominent figure of the Colour Field movement, Frankenthaler is known for her 1950s - 60s

soak-stain paintings4– works created by transferring thinned acrylic paint onto unprimed, white

canvas. The result – blended washes of translucent colour – is not unlike the characteristically

                                                                                                               3 Joseph Masheck, ‘Raw Art: Primitive Authenticity and German Expressionism’, Res: Anthropology And Aesthetics, no. 4, Autumn, 1982, p. 105. 4 John Elderfield, ‘After a "Breakthrough": On the 1950s Paintings of Helen Frankenthaler’, MoMa, vol. 2, no. 1 (Summer, 1989), p. 8-11.

hazy, colour block backgrounds of Franz Marc. This similarity is particularly evident when

comparing Marc’s Deer in the Woods II with Frankenthaler’s much later Tutti Frutti, 1966

(Figure 6). With strikingly similar colour palettes, the two works are aesthetically

complimentary. Additionally, with their patchwork planes, they are compositionally alike; in

fact, if one were to remove the sleeping deer, sloping tree branch, and surrounding foliage from

Deer in the Woods II, the piece could masquerade as an oil study or preliminary sketch for a

Frankenthaler soak-stain (Figure 7). Ultimately, though nearly fifty years apart, the pieces share

a notable – albeit highly overlooked – aesthetic, and again demonstrate Modern Art’s long and

crucial move toward abstraction.

Though Gauguin’s primitive landscape, Kandinsky’s energetic abstraction, and

Frankenthaler’s glowing, soak-stained canvas span over sixty years, they all represent the avant

garde rejection of realism and shift toward the non-pictorial – a notion that is clearly apparent

when explored with Franz Marc’s Deer in the Woods II. While each piece shares aesthetic

attributes with Deer in the Woods II – including colour palette, subject matter, composition, and

brushwork – it is the context that most closely binds them. The selected works comprise a

condensed and crucial timeline of 20th century art, commencing at the onset of abstraction

following Impressionism and concluding with the radically abstract Post-War era. While each

work represents a different movement and significant genre of painting, they also contextualise

both the painting itself and, on a much larger scale, the Modern Art trajectory as a whole.

Figures:

Figure 1.

Franz Marc, Deer in the Forest II, 1911

Oil on Canvas, 51 x 39 ½ in. (129.5 x 100.5 cm.)

Figure 2.

Franz Marc, The Red Deer, 1912

Oil on Canvas, 39 2⁄5 x 27 3⁄5 in. (100 x 70 cm.)

Figure 3.

Franz Marc, Deer in the Forest, 1914

Oil on Canvas, 39 2⁄5 x 39 3⁄5 in. (110 x 100.5 cm.)

Figure 4.

Paul Gauguin, Marquesan Landscape with Horses, 1901

Oil on Canvas

Figure 5.

Wassily Kandinsky, Mirnau with a Church, 1910

Oil on Cardboard, 25 ½ x 19 4⁄5 in. (64.7 x 50.2 cm.)

Figure 6.

Helen Frankenthaler, Tutti Frutti, 1966

Acrylic on Canvas, 117 x 69 in. (296 x 175 cm)

Figure 7.

Details from Deer in the Woods II and Tutti Frutti

Side-by-Side Comparisons

Bibliography:

Elderfield, John. ‘After a Breakthrough: On the 1950s Paintings of Helen Frankenthaler.’ MoMa,

vol. 2, no. 1 (Summer, 1989): 8-11.

Masheck, Joseph. ‘Raw Art: Primitive Authenticity and German Expressionism.’ Res:

Anthropology And Aesthetics, no. 4 (Autumn, 1982):105.

Partsch, Susanna. Franz Marc: 1880-1916. Taschen (2001): 37.

Payne, Elizabeth H. ‘Animals in Landscape.’ Bulletin Of The Detroit Institute Of Arts, vol. 36,

no. 3 (1956-1957): 75.