MARC 2023.210

Known primarily for his vividly coloured paintings of animals, Franz Marc turned to the woodcut to explore a more forceful and elemental visual language. In Tigers, the intertwined bodies of the animals are rendered in bold, rhythmical lines, stark contrasts and rough textures, evoking the tigers’ spirit and movement and heightening the work’s primal energy. For Marc, animals embody a purity missing from modern humanity and are able to reflect spiritual truths through their unity with nature. His aim: to ‘intensify my feeling for the organic rhythm of all things; I seek pantheist sympathy with the vibration and flow of the blood of nature – in the trees, in the animals, in the air’.

Alongside Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc was one of the founding members of artist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) in Munich in 1911. Known for its ‘cosmic landscapes’, which displayed a spiritual lyricism in its symbolic use of colour and abstracted forms, the group sought to represent inner truths and desires, rather than literal depictions of nature.