Red and Blue Horses

A fascinating secret lies in Marc's technique: he applied extremely thin layers of paint, almost like glazes, to allow light to pass through the colors and give this incandescent appearance. If he had been content with heavy impasto, the blue would never have had that ethereal depth that seems to radiate from inside the beasts. Another secret concerns the political reception of the work. Although Marc considered himself a German patriot, the Nazis classified his works as "Degenerate Art" (Entartete Kunst) in 1937. They did not understand why horses could be blue, seeing it as an insult to nature and the race. Fortunately, the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart managed to preserve some of these canvases from the destructive purges. Few people know that Marc spent hours in zoological gardens studying animal anatomy not to reproduce it, but to understand how muscles tense under the effect of emotion. In this painting, the curvature of the blue horse's neck is directly inspired by his studies of the draft horses he saw working in the fields, but he erased all traces of fatigue to keep only the nobility. There is also a secret link with the music of his time. Marc was very close to Schoenberg's research on atonality. He tried to create a "music of colors" where each hue would correspond to a note or a spiritual frequency. The red and blue horses are not objects but visual chords intended to resonate in the soul of the viewer. Finally, an infrared analysis revealed that Marc had initially sketched human figures in the background. He eventually chose to cover them with yellow and green paint to eliminate any human presence, thus reinforcing the sacred and exclusive character of the animal kingdom in his final composition.