Friday, December 18, 2020

RE-READING FRANZ MARC ~




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 ]