cover image Franz Marc: The Retrospective

Franz Marc: The Retrospective

Annegret Hoberg, Helmut Friedel, . . Prestel, $60 (335pp) ISBN 978-3-7913-3578-0

Best known for his paintings of horses, German expressionist Franz Marc (1880–1916) was a painter with a self-consciously intellectual bent, neither as revolutionary as Picasso nor as lyrical as Matisse. This thorough, carefully arranged retrospective (published along with an exhibition at the Lenbachhaus in Munich) traces his development from early pastoral scenes to later cubist-inspired canvases he created while part of the Blue Rider group he founded with Wassily Kandinsky; in the process, this catalogue clarifies the motivations of this very earnest painter. Particularly useful is an essay by Barbara Eschenburg, who sheds light on Marc's interest in Darwin and Nietzsche. Eschenburg shows how Marc's animals—typically embedded in a flat, crystalline-patterned space—represent an intuitive oneness with nature that has been lost to a Western culture obsessed with the individual. Annegret Hoberg provides a handy biographical overview, and Isabelle Jansen's essay explains Marc's attention to Egyptian, Japanese and other "exotic" cultures, considered at the time to represent an unspoiled ideal. With a more complete set of reproductions (including sketches and sculptures) than Mark Lawrence's 1989 study, Franz Marc , and more affordable than the ongoing multivolume Complete Works series, this is an excellent resource for both the scholar or the general reader. (May)