Franz Marc's The Bewitched Mill
Feb. 20th, 2022 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lhexanA formal analysis assignment for the art history course I'm taking this semester.
Franz Marc was a German Expressionist and friend of Kandinsky. He drew inspiration from the Cubist and Futurist schools of art, without falling under their shadow. Instead, Marc became representative of his country’s version of Expressionism, to the extent that the Nazi regime condemned his work as degenerate despite the fact he had died decades prior. Marc’s paintings are mostly animal paintings, and reflect his deep empathy for such creatures, an empathy which he expressed in his various stylistic flourishes.
I intended to write this essay about the endlessly rich Marc masterpiece Fate of the Animals from 1913, but that painting was not available on the Google Arts website. However, as the “Introduction to Art Historical Analysis” tutorial quotes, style is “a coherence of qualities in periods or people.” Such is this coherence that if an artist creates a masterpiece, one can often find points of comparison elsewhere in their work. Indeed, the website furnished the compositionally similar, but thematically contrasting, 1913 oil-on-canvas painting The Bewitched Mill.
The Bewitched Mill is 51” x 36”, vertically oriented, a size which can fill one’s entire field of view at a modest distance. It and Marc’s comparable Fate of the Animals from 1913 are both divided into left and right halves, but The Mill’s vertical orientation allows both to be viewed simultaneously. In contrast, The Fate’s horizontal orientation forces the two halves to be considered separately. This serves their different aims: The Mill depicts on the left a scene of human construction in harmony with nature on the right, while The Fate shows objectification and devastation (right) inflicted on the animals (left).
A large region of flowing water separates the two sides of The Mill, and each side is further divided into thirds; on the left, from top to bottom, a there are a cityscape, a mill wheel, and a waterfront, and on the right, a forest landscape, an abstract clearing, and some animals drinking water. Unlike many of Marc’s paintings, The Mill has both background and foreground that are (at least partly) representational. Nonetheless, these backgrounds emphasize their emotional impact over illusionistic considerations, with the cityscape dissolving into a confusing jumble while the forest side transitions into a recognizable forest with calm, muted tones. Each half alternates between representation and cubist abstraction: the left has its realistic waterwheel couched between cityscape and river water that are suggestive blocks of color, while the right has distinct animals at bottom, then an abstract grassy field of blocky colors, then representational trees and bushes. This draws on Marc’s strengths as both a representational and abstract painter: his knowledge of animal anatomy is superb, as is his ability to abstract that anatomy. Another vivid example of this combination of skills can be seen in his 1913 The Foxes.
Forms in Marc paintings become more chaotic and jumbled the more they pertain to humanity and human endeavor. This can be seen in the fully abstract portions of the Mill: the cityscape is the most chaotic portion, followed by the riverfront with its conflicting angles, followed by the regular, cascading rectangles of the field on the right. Rounded shapes tend to be reserved for animals and their habitats. The two drinking animals at lower right, the trees at upper right, and the birds in the center are the painting’s only organic forms. The waterwheel is the only curved form in the human half, and its spokes and buckets are expressively jagged and sharp. It also provides one of the two dominant lines in the painting, the other being the larger curve of the waterfall tangent to the waterwheel. The larger curve transitions in swirls to the curves of the trees and animals, and the regions of the animal half blend into each other, whereas the regions of the human half are starkly delineated. These two dominant lines suggest Marc’s overall attitude toward the human and animal worlds: they may meet in a momentary harmonious tangent, but they ultimately curve away from one another.
In Marc paintings, saturated and bright colors tend to be reserved for animals, while dark and desaturated areas denote humanity; this is demonstrated plainly in The Fate of the Animals. However, these tend not to be realistic colors; instead, Marc developed a personal color symbolism for various animal traits. This color symbolism was not restricted to the colors most common among actual animals; in The Mill, for example, there is a bright ochre deer and a dark blue boar.
Blue was Marc’s color for powerful animals; in addition to this painting’s boar, his work contains many blue horses (e.g. in the lost 1913 The Tower of Blue Horses, or the 1911 The Little Blue Horses), a stylistic trait so distinctive that it lent its name to the art journal/exhibition Marc co-founded with Kandinsky, The Blue Rider. In this journal, Marc wrote, “Blue is the masculine principle, robust and spiritual. Yellow is the feminine principle, gentle, serene, sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy.” The Mill has all three: the blue (masculine) boar, drinking in peace with a yellow (feminine) doe, across from an imposing and heavy red waterwheel. The Mill’s depiction of harmony between man and nature is reflected in the fact that colors are equally bright and saturated in both its human and animal halves, a departure from many of his other paintings.
Light in Marc paintings, like in many other Expressionist and Cubist paintings, wholly serves the painting’s emotional impact, as opposed to enhancing the illusionism of its depictions. There are no traditional light sources or shadows: the yellow doe at bottom right of The Bewitched Mill, for instance, has a head seemingly lit from upper left and a torso lit from bottom right. The sky itself is a stark red, a color chosen to make the distant city more jarring. The bright white of the waterfall dominates the painting tonally, serving to separate the painting’s halves while also sheltering a few bright birds. This serves the painting’s simultaneous themes of harmony and separation. The color and light balance of the human and animal sides are quite different: the human side transitions abruptly between a few colors clashing in both hue and brightness, while the animal side transitions smoothly between a greater number of more soothing, more harmonious colors.
There tend to be few distinct textures in The Mill or other Marc paintings, color usually appearing in solid blocks or steady gradients. This is not an artistic failing but a deliberate choice: complex textures tend to flatten or merge the shapes on which they appear, while simple, uniform textures emphasize and draw one’s attention to these constituent shapes and patterns. In The Mill, each half of the painting subdivides into regions of alternating abstraction and representation; furthermore, each such subregion has a different overall pattern of shapes. The waterfall has swirls and unbroken lines not seen in the rest of the painting. The three regions that might be called abstract and cubist (top left, lower left, and middle right) are nonetheless distinct in appearance, due to differing constituent shapes and angles. The three representational regions likewise have distinct patterns: animals at lower right whose different body parts are demarcated separately; trees at upper right with elliptic foliage; and the waterwheel divided radially into sharp pieces. Due to their different constituent patterns, each region of The Mill pops out individually when focused upon.
Franz Marc’s version of Expressionism employs a purposeful relationship between parts and whole when depicting animals. The human eye is good at discerning human features: minute differences in eyes, cheek and chin give rise to a countless variety of faces. However, the human eye is not so generous to animal features: one cow or horse will look much like another cow or horse. A Franz Marc animal, like the deer or boar at the lower right of The Mill, will subdivide into many distinct shapes, where a more realistic rendering would shade the parts of the animal into one whole. The abstraction of these components will vary widely, typically with the face rendered most realistically; compare The Foxes and The Little Blue Horses to see how widely Marc’s paintings vary between abstraction and realism. However, the overall effect is always a greatly increased complexity for the animal figure, reaching the complexity that the human eye naturally attributes to human figures. This indicates the unknown complexity of animal existence, suggesting that animals have inner lives as complex as human beings’, though alien in composition.
Franz Marc was a German Expressionist and friend of Kandinsky. He drew inspiration from the Cubist and Futurist schools of art, without falling under their shadow. Instead, Marc became representative of his country’s version of Expressionism, to the extent that the Nazi regime condemned his work as degenerate despite the fact he had died decades prior. Marc’s paintings are mostly animal paintings, and reflect his deep empathy for such creatures, an empathy which he expressed in his various stylistic flourishes.
I intended to write this essay about the endlessly rich Marc masterpiece Fate of the Animals from 1913, but that painting was not available on the Google Arts website. However, as the “Introduction to Art Historical Analysis” tutorial quotes, style is “a coherence of qualities in periods or people.” Such is this coherence that if an artist creates a masterpiece, one can often find points of comparison elsewhere in their work. Indeed, the website furnished the compositionally similar, but thematically contrasting, 1913 oil-on-canvas painting The Bewitched Mill.
The Bewitched Mill is 51” x 36”, vertically oriented, a size which can fill one’s entire field of view at a modest distance. It and Marc’s comparable Fate of the Animals from 1913 are both divided into left and right halves, but The Mill’s vertical orientation allows both to be viewed simultaneously. In contrast, The Fate’s horizontal orientation forces the two halves to be considered separately. This serves their different aims: The Mill depicts on the left a scene of human construction in harmony with nature on the right, while The Fate shows objectification and devastation (right) inflicted on the animals (left).
A large region of flowing water separates the two sides of The Mill, and each side is further divided into thirds; on the left, from top to bottom, a there are a cityscape, a mill wheel, and a waterfront, and on the right, a forest landscape, an abstract clearing, and some animals drinking water. Unlike many of Marc’s paintings, The Mill has both background and foreground that are (at least partly) representational. Nonetheless, these backgrounds emphasize their emotional impact over illusionistic considerations, with the cityscape dissolving into a confusing jumble while the forest side transitions into a recognizable forest with calm, muted tones. Each half alternates between representation and cubist abstraction: the left has its realistic waterwheel couched between cityscape and river water that are suggestive blocks of color, while the right has distinct animals at bottom, then an abstract grassy field of blocky colors, then representational trees and bushes. This draws on Marc’s strengths as both a representational and abstract painter: his knowledge of animal anatomy is superb, as is his ability to abstract that anatomy. Another vivid example of this combination of skills can be seen in his 1913 The Foxes.
Forms in Marc paintings become more chaotic and jumbled the more they pertain to humanity and human endeavor. This can be seen in the fully abstract portions of the Mill: the cityscape is the most chaotic portion, followed by the riverfront with its conflicting angles, followed by the regular, cascading rectangles of the field on the right. Rounded shapes tend to be reserved for animals and their habitats. The two drinking animals at lower right, the trees at upper right, and the birds in the center are the painting’s only organic forms. The waterwheel is the only curved form in the human half, and its spokes and buckets are expressively jagged and sharp. It also provides one of the two dominant lines in the painting, the other being the larger curve of the waterfall tangent to the waterwheel. The larger curve transitions in swirls to the curves of the trees and animals, and the regions of the animal half blend into each other, whereas the regions of the human half are starkly delineated. These two dominant lines suggest Marc’s overall attitude toward the human and animal worlds: they may meet in a momentary harmonious tangent, but they ultimately curve away from one another.
In Marc paintings, saturated and bright colors tend to be reserved for animals, while dark and desaturated areas denote humanity; this is demonstrated plainly in The Fate of the Animals. However, these tend not to be realistic colors; instead, Marc developed a personal color symbolism for various animal traits. This color symbolism was not restricted to the colors most common among actual animals; in The Mill, for example, there is a bright ochre deer and a dark blue boar.
Blue was Marc’s color for powerful animals; in addition to this painting’s boar, his work contains many blue horses (e.g. in the lost 1913 The Tower of Blue Horses, or the 1911 The Little Blue Horses), a stylistic trait so distinctive that it lent its name to the art journal/exhibition Marc co-founded with Kandinsky, The Blue Rider. In this journal, Marc wrote, “Blue is the masculine principle, robust and spiritual. Yellow is the feminine principle, gentle, serene, sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy.” The Mill has all three: the blue (masculine) boar, drinking in peace with a yellow (feminine) doe, across from an imposing and heavy red waterwheel. The Mill’s depiction of harmony between man and nature is reflected in the fact that colors are equally bright and saturated in both its human and animal halves, a departure from many of his other paintings.
Light in Marc paintings, like in many other Expressionist and Cubist paintings, wholly serves the painting’s emotional impact, as opposed to enhancing the illusionism of its depictions. There are no traditional light sources or shadows: the yellow doe at bottom right of The Bewitched Mill, for instance, has a head seemingly lit from upper left and a torso lit from bottom right. The sky itself is a stark red, a color chosen to make the distant city more jarring. The bright white of the waterfall dominates the painting tonally, serving to separate the painting’s halves while also sheltering a few bright birds. This serves the painting’s simultaneous themes of harmony and separation. The color and light balance of the human and animal sides are quite different: the human side transitions abruptly between a few colors clashing in both hue and brightness, while the animal side transitions smoothly between a greater number of more soothing, more harmonious colors.
There tend to be few distinct textures in The Mill or other Marc paintings, color usually appearing in solid blocks or steady gradients. This is not an artistic failing but a deliberate choice: complex textures tend to flatten or merge the shapes on which they appear, while simple, uniform textures emphasize and draw one’s attention to these constituent shapes and patterns. In The Mill, each half of the painting subdivides into regions of alternating abstraction and representation; furthermore, each such subregion has a different overall pattern of shapes. The waterfall has swirls and unbroken lines not seen in the rest of the painting. The three regions that might be called abstract and cubist (top left, lower left, and middle right) are nonetheless distinct in appearance, due to differing constituent shapes and angles. The three representational regions likewise have distinct patterns: animals at lower right whose different body parts are demarcated separately; trees at upper right with elliptic foliage; and the waterwheel divided radially into sharp pieces. Due to their different constituent patterns, each region of The Mill pops out individually when focused upon.
Franz Marc’s version of Expressionism employs a purposeful relationship between parts and whole when depicting animals. The human eye is good at discerning human features: minute differences in eyes, cheek and chin give rise to a countless variety of faces. However, the human eye is not so generous to animal features: one cow or horse will look much like another cow or horse. A Franz Marc animal, like the deer or boar at the lower right of The Mill, will subdivide into many distinct shapes, where a more realistic rendering would shade the parts of the animal into one whole. The abstraction of these components will vary widely, typically with the face rendered most realistically; compare The Foxes and The Little Blue Horses to see how widely Marc’s paintings vary between abstraction and realism. However, the overall effect is always a greatly increased complexity for the animal figure, reaching the complexity that the human eye naturally attributes to human figures. This indicates the unknown complexity of animal existence, suggesting that animals have inner lives as complex as human beings’, though alien in composition.
The Symbolism of Color
Date: 2022-03-25 01:20 am (UTC)And then we have the deliberate choices of the artist blurring the realistic with the abstract... Truly, this is proof that art serves more than to be a photographic representation of the subject.
Well done, and I enjoyed your essay! Bravo! Can't wait to read more... :)
Re: The Symbolism of Color
From: