European Journey

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Today: the Franz Marc exhibit at the Kunstbau Lenbachhaus Museum. Large retrospective with his fine fine drawings in a little sketchbook during WW1 that are as powerful as any of the paintings....at the same time re reading 'Steppenwolf' by Herman Hesse...Eva read it in German early on during the trip and here in Munich I found an English translation..occasioning these thoughts:

The Marc exhibit is one of those megashows that delight museum directors. The paper says the turnout exceeds expectations, and certainly , on this drippy wet Tuesday the crowds have come out, moving slowly from painting to painting, lingering to read the extensive biographical notes. We are with Gerda who knew Marc ( her mother was a painter) and so we get the unwritten gossip that his traditionalistic father wanted both Marc brothers to go into the army. In some way Gerda' s mother helped Franz stay out of the army for one year while his artistic and shy brother acceded and went in. And was promply killed, after which Marc himself joined the army and then got killed also at the age of 36.
Now :as you recall, the Steppenwolf is a man, age 50 or so who is completely alienated from his culture....a spiritual wolf, loner..detesting bourgeosie culture while knowing he can't escape being embedded in it. Turned against himself, in constant despair and pressed into disconnectedness by the hollowness of political rhetoric, commericialism...he suffers, and therefore, knows he is alive....he is also occasionally redeemed or comforted by a few remembered bits of high culture...some bars of music by Mozart, for example...
So: here we are in the museum crowd looking at the fabulous blue line that makes the shape of a horse: and not just blue horses, but yellow, green, purple horses..and not just horses, but flying cows, monkeys, many cats and dogs...and landscapes without flat horizons that make you feel vertiginous..and light that pours down, sometimes in cubist shafts, sometimes in liquid fountains...a good natured world, well studied by this teacher of animal anatomy...(oh, how true it is that when you see the great abstract artists and think, oh, I could do that...you come to find out how well they can draw, how they can make it photorealistically plain what they are drawing if they wish to do so, and everything starts with that ability to draw..Marc has a number of anatomic drawings of horse musculature and animal skeletons that make it clear how, while distorting a shape, it still reads as 'horse': 'cat', 'deer'...)

I have seen most of these paintings before on earlier trips to Munich and I wouldn't dream of being here without a trip to this museum to see the Marcs, Kandinskys etc. I don't know what the motivations of the rest of the people there might be...maybe they are there to be able to answer the question..Did you see the Marc exhibit? If I were to view their motives with contempt, I would have to be fair and doubt my own motives...We have gone to the major museums in each of the places we visited on this trip. But why? One cutural anthro noted that tourists would place themselves in front of the Mona Lisa and have their picture taken with it...without pausing to really look at the painting...

Somehow my life is enriched, made more complex, more interesting, by these windows to his pictorial world in which horses are blue and the meadows reach up to the sky on both sides of the painting. Where animals are loop-de-loop in their shape, twisting and turning in what feels like sheer animal energy coming through...Then:look closely and suddenly that fur is opaque layers of oilpaint..and that sunbeam is thick thick pigment that is transformed into something immaterial.....remembering Wiliam Carlos Williams seminal poem which has the line...'everything depends upon a red wheelbarrow...
Yes, everything depends upon the blule horses and green deer of his imagination into which we are given a look...the artist is dead, just as dead as his unlucky brother is dead, and his father and mother are dead..and so on and so on.. and the Steppenwolfe and Hesse are dead....and it is so easy to be frightened and overwhelmed as Adela Quested was at the Malabar Caves in 'Passage to India' when her voice was echoed and reechoed in the cave until it was nothing and she understood that she was nothing and her ego was nothing in the perspective of time in India and geological time....
And yet...and yet....standing absorbed once again in Marc's woods with the both fierce and gentle sun falling and the horses and deer discovered here and there among the twisted, living forest trees....is to be bathed and blessed in the warming, loving, redeeming YES

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