Estimated Price:

   £   

Realised Price:

   £   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

(1880-1916) Kauerndes Reh (Crouching Deer) tempera on cardboard laid down on wood 16 3/8 x 19 1/2 in. (41.5 x 49.5 cm) painted in 1911 Provenance Sammlung Nothmann, Berlin O'Hana Gallery, London Private Collection, Berlin Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited Cologne, Städtische Ausstellungshalle, Internationale Kunstausstellung des Sonderbundes, 1912, no. 452 Literature Alois Jacob Schardt, Franz Marc, Berlin, 1936, no. II-1911-5 Klaus Lankheit, Franz Marc: Katalog der Werke, Cologne, 1970, p. 137, no. 423 (illustrated) Donald Gordon, Modern Art Exhibitions, Munich, 1974, p. 591 Dr. Klaus Lankheit has confirmed the authenticity of this work. Franz Marc's tragically short career blossomed in 1911, the year that he created a large number of his greatest animal pictures. Deer motifs, like those of horses, were particularly appealing for the artist, as he believed they represented nature in its most pure and uncorrupted state. He referred to himself on at least one occasion as a roe deer, and this work may be regarded as a metaphorical self-portrait, the artist seeing himself through the lens of the natural world. Marc repeatedly spoke of his ambition to paint pictures as if he were observing reality through the eyes of an animal, wishing to achieve an entirely fresh vision. It was his discovery of the art of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists that first set him on course. Seeing such paintings shown in Paris in 1907, he claimed to have walked "like a roe-deer in an enchanted forest, for which it has always yearned" (quoted in Wolf-Dieter Dube, The Expressionists, London, 1998, p. 126). Our painting clearly has as its subject a roe deer resting in an "enchanted forest." In the simplicity and monumentality of its conception, Kauerndes Reh differs from his treatment of deer in other paintings of the same year, such as (Drei Rehe, Lankheit no. 162), but shares some compositional similarities with the celebrated oil Blauschwarzer Fuchs, 1911 (Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal), which depicts a fox resting in a forest glade. Defending the highly personal work exhibited by Kandinsky and his circle at the 1910 Neue Künstlervereinigung against the criticism of the Munich art establishment, Marc declared, "Don't they know that the same innovatory creative spirit, resolute and confident, is active in every corner of Europe today?" (quoted in ibid., p. 125). Marc became a strong advocate of progressive art in Germany, and it was he who made possible the publication of Die Blaue Reiter and who urged Reinhard Piper to publish Kandinsky's influential text, "On the Spiritual in Art." In 1911, the Cubists in Paris and the Italian Futurists were doing some of their most groundbreaking work, and Marc revelled in his recognition of the remarkably fertile artistic period in which he found himself. For him, artistic activity was where man came closest to the directness and innocence of the animal kingdom, which expressed itself without constraint and without the taboos of human, and particularly bourgeois, society. He had written a note to Reinhard Piper in 1908 announcing that "I am trying to intensify my ability to sense the organic rhythm that beats in all things, to develop a pantheistic sympathy for the trembling and flow of blood in nature, in trees, in animals, in the air - I am trying to make a picture from it" (ibid.).