Franz Marc · PD
Birds
Details
The story
Marc painted these three birds in 1914, in the months before the war started, and the shapes are already dissolving. The wings come down to a few strokes, and a fan of colour opens across the whole canvas, standing in for the beating.
He had spent years painting animals because he thought them cleaner than people, and by 1914 that was giving way too. Writing from the front in 1915, he described the change in his own work with no comfort in it. He had found mankind ugly, then found so much that felt wrong and ugly in animals as well that his pictures had gone schematic and abstract almost on their own. He was killed near Verdun in March 1916, at 36.
The Lenbachhaus in Munich bought the canvas in 1990 and owns it jointly with the German federal government.
