The Blue Horses

Barring the sky and sea, blue is the color found least in the natural world. Because of its rarity, blue was the last color to get its name; some primitive cultures don’t even have a name for blue. But I always loved blue. As a child, I lay in the grass and looked into the great expanse of sky and wondered, “What would happen if gravity lost its force? Could I fall into that endless blue sky?” That thought came back to me many times in my life. Even today, my love of blue, of water and sky, persists. I ponder, “What power keeps the human race grounded, rooted, and attached to earth?”

In the last years, my home has always been a hub of action and busyness. Both my husband and I are middle school teachers, and we taught all the years while raising our own five children. The décor in our living room was nothing grand, mostly the kids’ pictures and displayed projects, but in a prominent place, I always had a print of Franz Marc’s The Large Blue Horses. It wasn’t mounted in glass or even mat board, but each time we moved, it came right along with us, and back up it would go for no articulated reason.

My affinity with Franz Marc could have been the color blue, but I think it was more than that. Franz Marc was an artist, and to him, color shook his innermost being. He contemplated color for years and came to believe that color, a reflection of spiritual elements, had a significant force in the universe. And while every color had meaning, blue, the color of all things eternal, mirrored the divine.

Not long after Franz was born, his mother wrapped him in fine linen, brought him to the church, and carried him down the aisle to where the priest waited with basin and water. His father, stood stiff and formal. He waded through the nurses and nannies and dutifully pulled back the white lace to look properly at his newborn son for the first time. And promptly fainted. The newborn was remarkably ugly. But with a few smelling salts, the father revived in time to pronounce the name: Franz Moritz Wilhelm Marc.

Growing up, Franz was undeterred by the telling and retelling of this humorous episode. His unusual visage did nothing to dull his eye for beauty, nothing to daunt his independent spirit. 

Franz Marc always loved the animals, the woods, and the fields, and as he explored, he pondered whether animals could be purer and more beautiful than humans. Even as a child, grownups called him the philosopher. Later, after dabbling in theology, he enrolled in an arts program at the university. Then as an emerging German artist, he traveled to France to mingle and learn from his contemporaries in Paris. Immediately, he bonded with the ideas of the French expressionists.

Franz’s style became dynamic, alive with nature’s power. While at work, he mused the duality of the human spirit, always reaching for the divine, yet grounded on earth. Franz worked his magic in blues, blues that transcended the cares of intellect, of earth. Ultramarine, Sapphire, Indigo, Prussian blue.

Yellow, was for the sun, warmth, light, the color of joy. Maria was yellow. In the summer of 1911, he traveled to England and married her, and with this marriage came a peace and a joy that healed and revived. Blues and yellows, lifting to the eternal.

But red was for the earth, all things rooted and weighted.

He lavished the blue and the yellow, but the balance of red was important, too. His paintings danced with animals—a cow, a deer, a fox. But one animal was always blue. He covered canvas after canvas with horses. Horses with intertwining manes, horses in a herd, and horses singly. The paintbrush moved quickly but with grace. The cobalt curves of the horses’ backs and manes danced in a careful balancing act with the reds and browns of the rolling hills.

And then one last canvas—horses in a tower, blue, intense, linear, stacked one above the other, a tower of blue, a tower of horses.

Franz returned to Germany, unknowing that his rendezvous with France was far from over. Europe was changing. Clashing politics combined with modern weaponry and ambitious greed, alliances among expanding empires, and sweeping nationalism would soon leave a cultural, artistic continent-- a brutal wasteland. Did Franz have a premonition?

June 28, 1914: Archduke Ferdinand and wife Sophie—SHOT. Color now raised to a brilliant pitch with the mighty, rolling rock of vengeance, conflict, and war. Franz Marc’s pallet swam in a fury of color. Headlines screamed of earthshaking events, invasions, trenches, and artillery.

It was World War now, a senseless, brutal, barbaric war. Mandatory conscription bit like a great leveler, the master and the pauper, the artist and the laborer. All able-bodied men were equal fodder for the war machine. Franz was headed to the Western Front to burrow in trenches with the mud and the lice and the dying. The German Imperial Army, the Grim Reaper, was on the move.

At one point he escaped the trenches to paint military tarpaulins to hide artillery from aerial observation. He chuckled as he painted canvas covers with expressionist, cubist, and pointillist styles; what did it matter? It was color, and color to Franz had meaning. “Here amid slaughter, I can paint blue,” he thought.

Nations fell under the boot of the Imperialist Army. But France’s allies began mobilizing as well. Verdun stood like an ancient fortress, the jewel of French culture, and a target for German attack. In February 1914, the wheels of war screamed with an insatiable lust for destruction.

Soldiers on both sides dug trenches, snakelike. Fatigue pervaded body and spirit. Nights stretched glum and foreboding. Obscene dreams attacked like ferocious lions. The lines lay close, tense.

The Germans struck first with a massive bombardment. Scouts crept out to survey the damage. Damage was always good. Casualties a victory. Officers grinned smugly. Gains seemed significant. “Men die like cattle. All I see is red. An angry monstrous red” wrote Franz to Maria.

The world was shaking, roaring, like mankind had lost control. An evil had taken over and turned the world mad. Gunfire stuttered, and shells shrilled a devilish scream. Then someone yelled, “Gas!” A soldier lunged over the top of the trench and flopped in the cold mud, gargling, choking, drowning, then still. At night the red flares glimmered like obscene curses. Franz saw the legless, headless, the mindless, as if through a red lens. If there was a hell, could it be worse?

There was no sky, only smoke. At night Franz closed his eyes and worked. He turned the cogs of his mind with the greatest effort, to recall that blue, the Prussian, cobalt, sky-blue, or sea-blue, it didn’t matter.

“If I should die remember only this: the blue, the blue and the yellow. The animals, and mostly, just the horses,” he wrote.

French reinforcements came and France counterattacked: bombarded, attacked, counterattacked. Verdun was taken, and retaken, taken and retaken, at the cost of thousands. When the gas subsided for even a moment, soldiers darted out to fling bodies on wagons, mouths frothing, eyes white and staring, writhing or shrieking, some silent and still. They trundled the carts away, jerking and jolting through the barbed wire and mud.

“And all is flaming agony...” he had written to Maria. “Horrible and shattering.” Deep in the trenches, Franz kept a notebook of sketches. Here on the front, there was no paint, no color, his lines were stark and black.

And then it happened. Franz was struck in the head by shrapnel and killed instantly. March 8, 1916. He was gone, gone with his colors and dreams.

Maybe he did feel the exuberance of falling into a blue endless sky, an azure sky woven with yellow sunbeams. Was it difficult to let go of the earth, to pull roots, and go? Had the world turned too ugly for a painter like Franz, a man who had always craved beauty and peace? Perhaps the blue horses, the tower of horses, had ridden by and swept him up, riding over and past the red-brown hills to a world of color, a color that goes beyond the color waves that earthly eyes can absorb. 

And what became of the Tower of Horses?

Twenty years after Franz’s violent death at age thirty-six, the Nazi Party rose to power. The Nazis ridiculed and condemned Franz Marc’s paintings as degenerate and removed a hundred and thirty of his works from display. The Nazis then sold or traded them to raise cash for the Third Reich.

While some of his paintings of blue horses still exist, his original Tower of Horses was lost during the Second World War. It simply disappeared.  

Blue is still a special color for me. And I grieve the loss of great minds to mindless war. And, like Franz Marc, I meditate on the human dichotomy of reaching for the eternal while remaining grounded with a deep love for the earth. The blue, yellow, and red balanced perfectly.