Of all the marvelous books on Franz Marc's paintings
this smaller book is one of my favorites and the
author Peter-Klaus Schuster does such a wonderful job
his name deserves to be on the cover! at the very least
on the spine. Here is Schuster's thinking, "A painter
meets a woman poet whose personality differs from his own
almost to the point of contradiction, and yet he calls her "sister"
—that in a nutshell, is the story of the friendship between Franz Marc and
Else Lasker-Schuler." More on Else Lasker-Schuler in the future Birdhouse.
In this book we are offered a little over a year's correspondence from Marc to
Lasker-Schuler, known here as "Prince Jussuf", all through
a series of Marc's watercolors, from very late 1912 to the
spring of 1914. The heartbreak is that Marc was inducted into
WW I in 1914 and would be killed in the siege of
Verdun on March 4, 1916. A further darkness is that
these postcards were almost lost to the Nazis in 1939
as part of their campaign against "degenerate art."
Quick hands by a married couple, Sofie and Emanuel Fohn,
saved the Marc postcards with an exchange of works by
German Romantic artists for the expressionist artist's
exquisite postcards.
This book holds the story.
[ BA ]
