Children's Toys with Birdcage

Around 1911 the painters of the Blue Rider circle took children's drawings seriously as art. Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky collected them, and the group held child art up as a model. Maria Franck-Marc had been painting toys and children's scenes since 1908, and here she carried the idea into the composition itself. The Lenbachhaus points out that the objects are set out with no centre and no symmetry, just as the scientific literature of the time described the way children make pictures. Among them the museum lists a bird, a sheep, a rooster and a bowl, painted in strong, flat colour. She found the nerve for that colour at about this time, around 1911 or 1912, much as Franz Marc did, encouraged by getting to know the painter August Macke. The museum bought the canvas, a little under 90 centimetres wide, in 2017.