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Blue Horse I
Franz Marc · Early Modern (Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism)
- Artist
- Franz Marc (1880–1916)
- Date
- 1911
- Dimensions
- 112 x 84.5 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany
Blue Horse I shows a young blue horse standing alone in a landscape of brightly coloured hills, red, yellow, green and violet. Its head is lowered, its long legs slightly awkward, like a foal not yet sure of itself.
A closer look
The horse fills the picture, its blue body rendered in rounded shapes that echo the curves of the hills behind it. Marc wanted to paint not the outward appearance of animals but their inner life, as he imagined it; the blue, for him the colour of the spiritual, gives the young horse a quiet, dreamy dignity. The landscape is built of glowing, unnatural colours, so that the animal seems to belong to a purer, harmonious world. The work is one of the first in which Marc used colour in this symbolic way.
More by Franz Marc
In this gallery
Famous works elsewhere
- The Tower of Blue Horses 1914
- The fate of the animals 1913
- Fox 1911