Diego Rivera's tribute from Google

HAT TIP TO Los Angeles Times for this well written story about  the search Giant Google's tribute to Diego Rivera

Posted at 12:06 AM ET, 12/08/2011

DIEGO RIVERA GOOGLE DOODLE: Logo celebrates the legendary Mexican muralist whose career was larger than life

By Michael Cavna

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“SINCE ART IS ESSENTIAL for human life, it can’t just belong to the few.”

So demanded Diego Rivera, the leading Mexican muralist whose creative ambitions swept across the 20th century as large as his class-spanning public art. And Thursday, Google does what it can to spotlight Rivera’s essential art for an audience of millions.

Today, on the 125th anniversary of Rivera’s birth, Google’s homepage ”Doodle” celebrates the artist with a mural rich not only in color, but also in biographical detail.

Between the Doodle’s columns is the historic panorama of a towering career and transforming country. At left, in typical attire, Rivera himself stands on the telltale scaffolding, the full-bodied painter placed in telling proximity to a star-like image whose hues burn as bold and bright as the artist himself. (Like the burst of a sunflower surrounded by leaves, the image also sprouts thoughts of such agrarian Rivera works as “The Blood of the Revolutionary Martyrs Fertilizing the Earth.” from 1927.)

Beneath the scaffolding is a feminine silhouette — as if a shadowed nod to such Diego Rivera models as 1949’s ”Ruth Rivera” and her reflectionbeheld as if in the sun. And then there’s the prominent scaffolding itself — as if inspired directly by 1931’s “The Making of a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City.”

Rivera believed that outdoor public art helped visual mediums reach the masses across the classes. “Art is the universal language,” Rivera said, “and it belongs to all Mankind.”

And so it is telling that as our eye sweeps to the Doodle’s right, we see a man in red scarf, clad as a laboring campesino — so evocative of his“Peasants” and the iconic “The Flower Carrier.” And moving still right, by contrast, we see a bowler-topped, urban fellow — as if he migrated directly from the middle of 1948’s “Dreams of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park.”

Then, the central striking image of two faces — mother and offspring — that summons the emotional poetry of “Mother and Child Sleeping.”

“All art is propaganda,” Rivera said. “Religious art. Political art. The only difference is the kind of propaganda.”

And so it is fitting that as we move to the foot of the “L” in “Google,” we get an industrial worker wielding a tool — a visual reference to one of Rivera’s controversial American commissions. Rivera was hired by the Ford Motor Co., and his series of politically charged fresco panels was called “Detroit Industry.” Ultimately, Edsel Ford allowed that it was acceptable for an artist to displease his patron; the work is now recognized as one of Rivera’s masterpieces.

Rivera also believe that art was a great source of national pride, so as the Doodle’s Mexican flag waves to the right, we see buildings reflective of his official commissions and his modern-day nation.

And there, admiring all this, are two women. The woman with the trademark flowers in her hair is clearly Frida Kahlo — the legendary Mexican painter and wife of Rivera whose life and career is so inextricably intertwined with Rivera’s. Kahlo, in fact, has already received her own Google Doodle — back in 2010.

And the woman in white? That could an allusion to Lupe Marin, who was referred to as “Rivera’s other wife.”

----read the rest here: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/12/google-doodle-celebrates-the-work-of-diego-rivera.html

Mural Altered at Penn State

Should art be altered to reflect the change

 in understanding about a subject?

Painted out of the picture

Prior to his day in court, former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky,  and was convincingly tried by the media, and found and presented as guilty of heinous sexual abuses on multiple children.  Sandusky, has been charged with 40 criminal counts related to sexual abuse that occurred over 15 years. Sandusky’s attorney, Joe Amendola, says his client has been aware of the accusations for about three years and maintains he is innocent.
And prior to his day in court, Sandusky's image was removed from the `Inspiration Mural' at Penn State.

Will Paterrno be Next To Be Removed?

Joe Patterno, nicknamed "JoePa," holds the record for the most victories by an FBS football coach with 409 and is the only FBS coach to reach 400 victories. He coached five undefeated teams that won major bowl games and, in 2007, was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach. He defended his failure to go to police after Mike McQueary, then a 28-year graduate assistant and now Penn State’s receivers coach, told him of the March 2002 incident, in which Sandusky assaulted the boy in the showers. Paterno report the incident up the chain of command to Tim Curley, Penn State athletic director. Curley reports it up his chain of cpommand to senior vice president for finance and business Gary Schultz. Both Curley and Schultz meet with McQuery


"While I did what I was supposed to with the one charge brought to my attention, like anyone else involved I can’t help but be deeply saddened these matters are alleged to have occurred," Paterno says.

Curley and Schultz surrender that afternoon on charges of perjury and failure to report the possible abuse of a child. Each is released on $75,000 bail after appearing in a Harrisburg courtroom.

Paterrno offered to resign at the end of the season. He offered his regrets and acknowledges some responsibility for the scandal. "It is one of the great sorrows of my life," it said. "With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more." He also added: "At this moment the board of trustees should not spend a single minute discussing my status. They have far more important matters to address."

But the board of trustees was greatly critical over Paterrno's failure to call police or follow up after learning about the alleged March 2002 assault. On the same night that Patterno offers to resign at thend of the season, he is fired by the University.

At a packed news conference at 10 p.m. Wednesday, when John Surma, vice chairman of the board, announced that Graham Spanier and Joe Paterrno were being fired.

Graham Spanier, who had been president at Penn State for 16 years, the president of one of the biggest, most-respected universities in the country, who manages a $4.3 billion budget, 24 branch campuses and 96,000 students, was also dismissed after being caught up in the child molestation charges.

But after the announcement reporters from every national news outlet from NPR to Fox News spent their time asking detailed questions — some of them angrily — about why the football coach was let go. 

Soon after students pour into the streets toward the columns of the Old Main administration building and into Beaver Canyon, a street located between rows of tall apartment buildings. They throw rocks and bottles, overturn a TV news van and kick out the windows, and chant "We Want Joe!" The police respond with pepper spray.

Make him, and his memory go away

(Reuters) - Until a few days ago, Jerry Sandusky's face smiled down on students from a mural in downtown State College, the home of Penn State University, where football players and coaches are treated like royalty.

On Wednesday, the creator of the mural painted over Sandusky. The former assistant football coach was charged a few days earlier with sexually abusing eight boys over more than a decade.

"I got an email yesterday from one of the victim's mothers saying simply, 'Michael, can you please take Sandusky off the mural,'" said Michael Pilato, a local painter who created the "Inspiration" mural in 2001.

The Harrisburg Patriot-News, citing five sources, reported in March 2011 that a grand jury had been meeting for at least 18 months to consider child abuse allegations against Sandusky.

Last weekend, Sandusky was charged with sexually abusing eight boys between 1994 and 2008.

Through the long investigation, Sandusky himself remained a fixture on campus. As recently as this summer, he was seen using the football players' weight room several times a week.

Sandusky was also seen at a Second Mile golf fundraiser, and several attendees said he appeared up-beat.

The former coach is removed

Sandusky's memoir titled "Touched" was published in 2000. 

In the book, Sandusky confesses an inability to grow up. "I had always professed that someday I would reap the benefits of maturity, but my lifestyle just wouldn't let me," he wrote, later adding that "the times when I found myself searching for maturity, I usually came up with insanity."

With more time on his hands after retiring, Sandusky shifted his focus to the Second Mile, the foster home-turned-charity for kids from broken homes he started in 1977, the year after taking the defensive coordinator job at Penn State.

Second Mile was an integral part of Sandusky's life. He was its chief fundraiser and best cheerleader and even drew a salary, though he had no operational authority.

According to the grand jury, the Second Mile was also where Sandusky found his victims.

*http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/12/us-usa-crime-coach-feature-idUSTRE7AB0OW20111112

The elusive art of the elusive artist Bansky in the news

Bansky as he appeared in his documentary

It has been said, sometimes smugly, by some street artist that if the public doesn't like their art (graffiti) then they can just paint over it. The situation is more true if the graffiti art is painted on private property.

This year there are two interesting stories about the street artist Banksky's work painted on private property. 

Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, film director, and painter. He has dozens of celebrity collectors - including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Christina Aguilera - who have paid hundreds of thousands  for his creations.

Wikkepedia writes:

"Banksy began as a freehand graffiti artist 1992–1994[13] as one of Bristol's DryBreadZ Crew (DBZ), with Kato and Tes.[14] He was inspired by local artists and his work was part of the larger Bristol underground scene with Nick Walker, Inkie and 3D.[15][16] From the start he used stencils as elements of his freehand pieces, too.[13] By 2000 he had turned to the art of stencilling after realizing how much less time it took to complete a piece. He claims he changed to stenciling whilst he was hiding from the police under a rubbish lorry, when he noticed the stenciled serial number[17] and by employing this technique, he soon became more widely noticed for his art around Bristol and London.[17]

Banksy wrote in his glossy coffee-table book Wall and Piece : “The people who truly deface our neighborhoods are the companies that scrawl giant slogans across buildings and buses trying to make us feel inadequate unless we buy their stuff. They expect to be able to shout their message in your face from every available surface but you’re never allowed to answer back. Well, they started the fight and the wall is the weapon of choice to hit them back.”

Many consider him, his name at least, as the best know street artist of all time. His fame has increased dramatically with his documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop,"

 In 2006 Banksy was introduced to Thierry Guetta, an exuberant, eccentric French expatriot claiming to be making a documentary about street artist. Banksy joins in on the project, but is greatlly dissapointed with the final results. Banksy decides to take over the editing of the project from Guetta and brings in two proffesionals Jamie D'Cruz and Chris King, as producer and editor. They went through thousnads of hours of  Guetta's unlabeled film, much of it unuasable. Guetta, not detered by his freinds rejection of his editing of the material, returns home to Los Angeles to begin making art himself. Banksy comes up with the idea to shift the focus from street artist to focus on Guetta.

The resulting documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop", list Banksy as it's director. The film has received overwhelmingly positive reviews, holding 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, and was nominated for Best Documentary in the 2011 Academy Awards. One consistent theme in the reviews was the authenticity of the film: Was the film just an elaborate ruse on Banksy's part, The Boston Globe movie reviewer Ty Burr found it to be quite entertaining and awarded it four stars. He dismissed the notion of the film being a "put on" saying "I’m not buying it; for one thing, this story’s too good, too weirdly rich, to be made up. For another, the movie’s gently amused scorn lands on everyone."

Still not everyone know who Banksy is: Banksy's gorilla in a pink mask (July 2011)

Banksy's gorilla in a pink mask appeared on the wall of the former North Bristol Social Club in Eastville One of street artist Banksy's most famous early works in Bristol has been mistakenly painted over.

The gorilla in a pink mask on the wall of the ex-North Bristol Social Club, in Eastville, had been a familiar landmark in the area for more than 10 years.

But the building has recently been turned into a Muslim cultural centre.

New owner Saeed Ahmed assumed it was a regular piece of graffiti and had it painted over. "I thought it was worthless," he said.

He added: "I didn't know it was valuable and that's why I painted over it. I really am sorry if people are upset."

The wall was whitewashed by the new owner of the building who had never heard of Banksy.

A paintings conservator, Richard Pelter of Park Street-based International Fine Art Conservation Studios, was last night attempting to remove the whitewash using large cotton buds and sensitive cleaning materials.

Mr Pelter said he had been doing some tests.

"What I found was that the paint there was quite soluble underneath, but no-one could actually tell me where it was on the wall. The upper layers of paint can be removed, very carefully. It would take quite a long time and cost quite a bit of money to do it."

The gorilla was uncovered, maybe not the best idea.

Every Picture Tells a Lie -uncovered (September 2011)

In 2003 Banksy spray painted a mural inside, on the wall of  a contemporary art gallery in Germany's capital. The graffiti shows five soldiers with angel's wings and yellow smiley faces beneath the slogan "Every picture tells a lie!"

When the show was over the picture was painted over.

Now the covering paint has been removed. The mural was excavated as part of an art project by Brad Downey, a Berlin-based American artist, whose exhibition is titled What Lies Beneath and focuses on layers of paint. Downey, who also took part in the 2003 exhibit, remembered Banksy's work and wanted to uncover it for his 2011 project.

The gallery is unsure of what will happen to Banksy's work once Downey's exhibit ends on Oct 23rd. It could go back to hibernating behind white-washed walls -- that is, if someone doesn't try to buy it first.

It's 9/11 again - a choice for an artist meditation: Van Gogh

It's  9/11 again, television and papers are filled with reflections on the terrorist attack ten years ago. As the United States has found, the true enemy is always allusive.

Artist must face allusive threats from such enemies as procrastination to perfectionism. So for today's reflection I chose a letter from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother:

My dear Theo,

Life passes, time does not return, but I am dead set on my work, just for the very reason that I know the opportunities of working do not return.

Especially in my case, in which a more violent attack may destroy forever my ability to paint.

During the attacks I feel a coward before the pain and suffering—more of a coward than I ought, and it is perhaps this very moral cowardice which, while formerly I had no desire to get better, makes me now eat like two, work hard, limit myself in my relations with the other patients for fear of a relapse—altogether I am now trying to recover like a man who has meant to commit suicide and, finding the water too cold, tries to regain the bank.

My dear brother, you know that I came to the south and threw myself into my work for a thousand reasons. Wishing to see a different light, thinking that to look at nature under a brighter sky might give us a better idea of the Japanese way of feeling and drawing. Wishing also to see this stronger sun, because one feels that without knowing it one could not understand the pictures of Eugène Delacroix from the point of view of execution and technique, and because one feels that the colors of the prism are veiled in the mist of the North.

My work is going very well, I am finding things that I have sought in vain for years, and feeling that, I am always thinking of that saying of Delacroix’s that you know—that he discovered painting when he no longer had either breath or teeth.

Well, with this mental disease I have, I think of the many other artists suffering mentally, and I tell myself that this does not prevent one from exercising the painter’s profession as if nothing was amiss.

When I realize that here the attacks tend to take an absurd religious turn, I should almost venture to think that this even necessitates a return to the North. Do not talk too much about this to the doctor when you see him—but I do not know if this does not come from living for so many months, both in the Arles hospital and here, in these old cloisters. In fact, I really must not live in such an atmosphere, one would be better off in the street. I am not indifferent, and even during the suffering, religious thoughts sometimes bring me great consolation. Thus this last time during my illness a misfortune happened to me—that lithograph of Delacroix’s, the Pietà, together with some other sheets, fell into some oil and paint and was ruined.

I reproach myself for my cowardice; I ought rather to have defended my studio, even if it meant fighting with the police and the neighbors. Others in my place would have used a revolver, and certainly if as an artist one had killed some rotters like that, one would have been acquitted. I should have done so, and as it is I have been cowardly and drunk.

Ill as well, yet I have not been brave. Then face to face with the suffering of these attacks I feel very frightened too, and I do not know if my zeal is anything different from what I said, it is like someone who meant to commit suicide and finding the water too cold, struggles to regain the bank.

Do not fret in any case—my work goes well and look here, I can’t tell you how it rekindles me to tell you sometimes how I am going to do this or that, cornfields, etc. I have done the portrait of the warder, and I have a duplicate of it for you. This makes a rather curious contrast with the self-portrait I have done, in which the look is vague and veiled, while he has something military in his small, quick black eyes.

I have made him a present of it, and I shall do his wife too if she is willing to sit. She is a faded woman, an unhappy, resigned creature of small account, so insignificant that I have a great desire to paint that blade of dusty grass. I have talked to her sometimes when I was doing some olive trees behind their little house, and she told me then that she did not believe that I was ill—and indeed you would say as much yourself now if you saw me working, my brain so clear and my fingers so sure, that I have drawn that Pietà by Delacroix without taking a single measurement, and yet there are those four hands and arms in the foreground in it—gestures and torsions of the body not exactly easy or simple.

I beg you, send me the canvas soon if it is possible, and then I think that I shall need ten more tubes of zinc white. All the same, I know well that healing comes—if one is brave—from within, through profound resignation to suffering and death, through the surrender of your own will and of your self-love. But that is no use to me—I love to paint, to see people and things and everything that makes our life—artificial—if you like. Yes, real life would be a different thing, but I do not think I belong to that category of souls who are ready to live and also ready at any moment to suffer.

What a queer thing touch is, the stroke of the brush.

In the open air, exposed to wind, to sun, to the curiosity of people, you work as you can, you fill your canvas anyhow. Then, however, you catch the real and the essential—that is the most difficult. But when after a time you take up this study again and arrange your brush strokes in the direction of the objects—certainly it is more harmonious and pleasant to look at, and you add whatever you have of serenity and cheerfulness.

Ah, I shall never be able to convey my impressions of some faces that I have seen here. Certainly this is the road on which there is something new, the road to the south, but men of the north have difficulty in penetrating it. And already I can see myself in the future, when I shall have had some success, regretting my solitude and my wretchedness here, when I saw between the iron bars of the cell the reaper in the field below. Misfortune is good for something.

To succeed, to have lasting prosperity, you must have a temperament different from mine; I shall never do what I might have done.

Shiro Daimon on dancing

Shiro Daimon is recognized as one of the most remarkable Japanese dancers today. His meticulous technique, complete, is both as a dancer, actor, musician. Disciple of the great masters of Noh (Kanza Tetsunojô 8th, national treasure) and dance of Kabuki (Hanayagi School)

It's been almost 60 years since I started dancing,
 yet dance is still a mystery to me.
Dance upsets me now as before.  

Why does the dance make me crazy?

One day, I must find the reason.

Once I wrote: 

"At the age of 7, I was eaten by the dance." 

Indeed, at that time, the days preceding the show, 

my throat could not accept food and after the dance, 

my soul felt separated from my body,

as though it had left, gone on a journey.

I can find in the story the origin of my religion of the dance.

The most important thing for the dance is to liberate the soul. 

The choreography is a way for the release. 

The soul is a flower. 

The technique is a seed. 

I planted on my body several seeds so that the flower may open.

It is the Soul who chooses the seed. 

She, the Soul, makes me dance. 

If  one day my body is like a frozen tree, 

certainly my soul will

open like a flower.

by Shiro Daimon

"Inflammatory art" in Los Angeles

An artist's incendiary painting is his bank statement

Alex Schaefer's depiction of a Chase branch going up in flames drew the attention of L.A. police, who asked if he was a terrorist. He said the work was a metaphor for the havoc banking practices have caused the economy.

full story at LA Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-bank-painting-20110828,0,4395501.story

Hilarious 'Do Not Enter' Series By One Of the Finest Street Artists-'Dan Witz'

Hilarious 'Do Not Enter' Series By One Of the Finest Street Artists-'Dan Witz'

 Dann Witz is a Brooklyn, US based street artist and a realist painter who has been creating explicit works of art since the 1970s. Each of his creations look realistic and you'll definitely give a second look to his confusing creations. The give a look as if a real person is staring or peeping out of them. His work has been showcased throughout the US and Europe. Not only that, he has authored 18 books and taken part in many films.

"As an art student, right out of the gate, rebellion was my default setting. The idea was, if the world was a fucked up place that desperately needed changing, and contemporary art (and art schooling) had failed us in this respect, then it became necessary to subvert current art practices—to, yes, destroy our idols. Taking my cue from punk rock and graffiti I abandoned conventional art making and took to the streets", saysthe artist. Though all of his projects are awesome but I found 'Do Not Enter' project the best and I have some hilarious images of that project to share with you guys. Check them out!

Hat tip to http://www.e-junkie.info

Creationem-photography: Shiva pose posted in Illiterate Magazine online

The Shiva Pose by Paul Grant (follower of Basho)

This is from a collection of works that I made (6) for a group show called “Bike Art” held at Altered Esthetics's in Minneapolis Minnesota . All the art in the show had to have bicycles in it. Each of my works showed people doing yoga poses while on bicycles.

Each image begins as a photograph and then undergoes transformation using Photoshop, then reprinted, the new image undergoes transformation using pastels, then is scanned - and printed again as a photograph.

The process is to create a `work’ , rather than just take a photograph (which is capturing an image). I call this concept  of creating a `work’, using a camera as only one tool in a process and not the end means : “creationem-photography”.

In my classification system there are three uses for a cameras ability to capture:

1.A photograph is a predetermined picture, where there is forethought and, perhaps,  posing. The photograph is a capture of physical reality in time and space.

2. A snapshot, which is a happenstance picture . Where the camera is used to record something not specifically planned on. The snapshot is a capture of physical reality in time and space..

3. Creationem-photography, which is the using of either a photograph or a snapshot and manipulating it to create something new and different and unreal.

I do not judge any of the classifications to be higher or lower. The sucess of each process can only be judged by the final work. I would be interested to hear other peoples views about  this.

The friend who posed for the original `photograph’ was 7 months pregnant.

70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)

Beautiful Franz Marc picture of a deer on auction at Christies

Franz Marc' "Reh"

I love Franz Marc's work. This beautiful piece is being auctioned at Christies sale: Impressionist/Modern Evening Sale -  February9, 2011 -London, King Street -Online at: http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/searchresults.aspx?action=refine&intSaleID=23150&sid=27906e79-de06-4463-8688-46597c27f25c&t=1296156407185#action=search&intSaleID=23150&sid=27906e79-de06-4463-8688-46597c27f25c

Lot Notes

'What does the deer have in common with the world we see? Does it make any reasonable or even artistic sense to paint the deer as it appears on our retina, or in the manner of the Cubists because we feel the world to be cubistic? Who says the deer feels the world to be cubistic? - it feels it as a deer, and thus the landscape must also be 'deer' ... I could paint a picture called 'The Deer'. Pisanello has just done that. But I may also want to paint 'The Deer Feels'. How infinitely more refined a sensitivity must a painter have to paint that!' (Franz Marc, 'How does a Horse See the World?', 1911, quoted in K. Lankheit, ed., Franz Marc: Schriften, Cologne, 1978, p. 99.)(1)

One of the very finest of Marc's tempera paintings, Reh is an holistic semi-abstract fusion of dynamic intersecting lines of force, figurative form and rich, radiant colour, executed in 1912, at the very height of the artist's self-defined mission to devise an 'animalised' art. The aim of such 'animalisation', as Marc described it, was to render a vision of the world as it might be seen from within - through the feeling and the senses of the living sentient beings (animals and man), who inhabited it. Reh is an extraordinarily elegant, simple and stunningly composed painting that powerfully asserts itself as an icon of this visionary aim.

One of a series of groundbreaking and revolutionary paintings of lone deer enveloped in their natural environment that Marc produced between 1912 and 1913, Reh is a work that belongs amongst the very greatest of Marc's artistic achievements. For Marc, the deer, more than any other animal, symbolized the innocence, fragility and preciousness of animal life as well as what he believed to be its pervasive suffering. Perhaps inspired by a story by one of his favourite authors, Gustave Flaubert's La légende de Saint-Julien,(2)

 throughout 1912 and 1913 Marc employed the image of a lone deer sheltering in the forest, threatened by an unseen presence and at the mercy of the violent destructive forces of nature, in a series of ambitious semi-abstract Cubo-Futurist paintings such as Reh im Wald II (Lenbachhaus Museum, Munich), Reh im Klostergarten (Lenbachhaus Museum Munich,) and Tierschicksale (Kunstmuseum Basel). In these works, culminating in his masterpiece Tierschicksale (The Fate of the Animals), Marc encapsulated the central themes of his work. Here, his holistic view of the cosmos and of a spiritualised vision of the world, as seen by innocent animals sensitive to hidden unseen forces and presences, is rendered in semi-abstract form and pulstaing colour, derived from Delaunay and the Italian Futurists, to present a poetic vision of the life of the world on the point of dramatic change. Merging dynamic abstract forces, cubo-futuristic planes and fragmentation, the deer stand at the centre of these paintings and symbolize, as they had in Flaubert's Saint - Julien, innocent victims threatened by a vast unknown destructive force. Prophetic of calamity and, as many have pointed out, also perhaps of the forthcoming deluge of the Great War in which Marc himself would die, these paintings are intimations of the Apocalypse which Marc believed would mark the beginning of a new age of the Spirit. If his blue horse was his symbol of this forthcoming age, the deer was the image he used for the necessary sacrifice of innocence that would have to precede it.

'I am seeking a feeling for the organic rhythm in all things, a pantheistic empathy into the shaking and flowing of the blood in nature, in trees, in animals, in the air', Marc had written in 1910. 'I see no happier means to the 'animalisation of art', as I would like to call it, than the animal picture. Therefore I treat it accordingly' (Franz Marc, 'Letter to Reinhard Piper', 20 April, 1910, in G. Meissner, ed. , Franz Marc, Briefe, Schriften und Aufzeichenungen, Leipzig, 1980, p. 30).(3)

 Reh is a work that expresses this 'pantheistic empathy' and the invisible 'organic rhythm' existing between 'all things' through its formal synthesis of solid form - animal, mountain, trees etc - and abstracted kraftlinien or force-lines derived from the Italian Futurist art he had recently seen at the Der Sturm Gallery exhibition of their work.

With the aim of creating 'symbols for their own time, symbols that will take their place on the altars of a future spiritual religion', it was Marc's intention to reveal, through his work, the 'magic, sympathetic bond between the earth and the organic forms it has engendered, earth and object... blended together' (Franz Marc, Almanac Der Blaue Reiter, Munich, 1912, p. 6 and F. Marc, 'Geistige Güter', in Der Blaue Reiter, 1965, p. 21) (4)

This symbiotic sense of interdependence between animal and landscape and the holistic universal nature of all things is expressed in Reh through a subtle abstracting tendency that Marc has used to blur the boundaries between abstract graphic mark and figurative image. The slightly elongated forms of the deer and the rhythm of her legs are echoed by angled brush lines delineating trees and mountains behind. In this way the painting becomes as much a cubo-futuristic construction of intersecting dynamic form as in a work such as Balla's sculpture of Boccioni's fist, or his lines of movement of a motor car, as it is a figurative representation of a deer in a forest. It is the ambiguity established by such an abstracting tendency that ultimately imbues the work with the sense that it is a depiction of a deeper symbiotic reality existing between animal and environment - that it is a picture not of a deer, but of an entirely new and holistic way of seeing the world - an ideal and spiritualised vision of how a deer might perceive its world.

Lot Description

Franz Marc (1880-1916)
Reh
signed 'F.Marc' (lower right)
gouache, watercolour and pencil on paper
18 x 15½ in. (45.7 x 39.2 cm.)
Executed in 1912 

Pre-Lot Text

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION

Provenance

(possibly) Kurt Schueler, Berlin, by 1922.
Galerie Ferdinand Möller, Berlin, by whom probably acquired from the above after 26 July 1933.
Eberhard Thost, Hamburg, by whom acquired from the above by 1936.
Siegfried Adler, Montagnola, by 1974.
Galerie Margret Heuser, Dusseldorf, by 1997.
Private collection, Rheinland. 

Literature

A. J. Schardt, Franz Marc, Berlin, 1936, no. II-1912-26, p. 167 (with incorrect dimensions).
K. Lankheit, Franz Marc, Katalog der Werke, Cologne, 1970, no. 445, p. 144 (illustrated, dated '1912/14').
A. Hoberg & I. Jansen, Franz Marc, The Complete Works, Volume 2, Works on Paper, Postcards, Decorative Arts and Sculpture, London, 2004, no. 221, p. 198 (illustrated p. 199).

Exhibited

London, The Institute of Contemporary Arts, The Arts Council of Great Britain & The Insitute of Contemporary Arts: Modern German Prints & Drawings, 1949, no. 74 (illustrated pl. 1, titled 'Gazelle').
Hamburg, Kunstverein, Franz Marc, Gemälde, Gouachen, Zeichnungen, Skulpturen, November 1963 - January 1964, no. 74.
Düsseldorf, Galerie Margret Heuser, Frühjahr 1997, March - April 1997, no. 4.
Berlin, Brücke-Museum, Der Blaue Reiter und seine Künstler, October 1998 - January 1999, no. 62, p. 382 (illustrated p. 274); this exhibition later travelled to Tübingen, Kunsthalle, January - March 1999.
Munich, Städtische Galerie in Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Franz Marc, Die Retrospektive, September 2005 - January 2006, no. 189, p. 325 (illustrated p. 251, dated '1912-13'). 

Department Information

• Impressionist & Modern Art

Artist/Maker/Author Information

• Marc, Franz (1880-1916)

Keywords

• Marc, Franz (1880-1916)
• 1910s
• Drawings & Watercolors
• paper
• Germany
• Expressionist
• animals

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The essay: Franz Marc, 'How does a Horse See the World?', 1911 can be found in :

2. Gustave Flaubert's La légende de Saint-Julien

3. This letter, and Marc's relationship to the publisher Reinhard Pipe are discussed in detail in:

4.