NARRATOR:
German artist Franz Marc painted this landscape, titled Gebirge, or Mountains, with rich, saturated colors and bold outlines. At the center of the canvas, you can see a zigzag-shaped section that’s thought to be the Pioneer Path in Bavaria. Curator Janet Bishop.
JANET BISHOP:
It looks white, icy and treacherous, yet at the very top of the composition is a bright orange sun peeking over the hills.
NARRATOR:
Notice the pink hills in the upper right-hand corner. These soft curves lead down to dark, muted blue tones. They contrast with the white glacier-like form that cuts through the center of the painting in a more geometric manner.
Marc was a member of Der Blaue Reiter, or the Blue Rider, a group of German painters who were dubbed “Expressionists.” Rather than illustrate how things looked, they used extremes of color and line to infuse their work with emotional intensity.
What you see before you is not actually the first version of this work. An earlier version of the same painting was displayed in 1911 next to a painting by Parisian artist Robert Delaunay. Look down at your screen to see a photograph from that exhibition of the original Gebirge next to Delaunay’s painting, The Eiffel Tower.
Marc was so strongly influenced by Delaunay’s use of bright colors and geometric structure that he completely transformed his painting, making it into a visibly cubist rendition of the Southern German landscape that was completely distinct from anything he’d done before.
BISHOP:
It was a very different painting. The mountains were much softer, more curvilinear. And when he went back the following year and repainted it, it became much more angular and fractured.