Franz Marc - War Quotes

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It is like a presentiment of the war, terrible and gripping; I can hardly realize that I painted it myself [remark on his painting 'The fate of Animals', created in 1913]. In the hazy photograph, at any rate, it has an indefinable reality that quite made my flesh creep. It is artistically logical to paint such paintings 'before' a war, not as stupid reminiscences 'after' a war. [Marc was soldier in World War 1]. For one should paint constructive, prophetic pictures, not souvenirs, as is the usual fashion. And those are all I have in mind. It used to puzzle me sometimes, but now I know why it has to be like that. But these old pictures [his paintings, he made before the War] from the autumn Salon are sure to be resurrected again..

Franz Marc
Of the battlefield at Verdun:
For days I have seen nothing but the most awful scenes that the human mind can imagine... Stay calm and don't worry: I will come back to you – the war will end this year. I must stop; the transport of the wounded, which will take this letter along, is leaving. Stay well and calm as I do.

Franz Marc
In war we are all equal, but among a thousand good men, a bullet hit an irreplaceable one... We painters know well that with the loss of his harmony, the color in German art will become many shades paler..

Franz Marc
The day is not far distant on which Europeans – the few Europeans who will still remain – will suddenly become painfully aware of their lack of formal concepts. Then will these unhappy people bewail their wretched state and become seekers after form. They will not seek the new form in the past, in the outward world, or in the stylized appearances of nature, but they will build up their form from within themselves, in the light of their new knowledge that turned the old world fable into a world form, and the old world view into a world insight. [written at the World War 1. front - near Verdun, 1915].

Franz Marc
The impure men and women who surrounded me (and particularly the men), did not arouse any of my real feelings; while the natural feeling for life possessed by animals set in vibration everything good in me. [from the front of World War 1.].

Franz Marc
There is something impressive and mystical about the artillery battles... I still do not think differently about the war... It simply seems to me feeble and lifeless to consider it vulgar and dumb. I dream of a new Europe, I.... see in this war the healing, if also gruesome, path to our goals; it will purify Europe, and make it ready… Europe is doing the same things to her body France did to hers during the Revolution.... the war is not turning me into a realist – on the contrary: I feel so strongly the meaning which hovers behind the battles, behind every bullet, so that the realism, the materialism disappears completely. Battles, wounds, motions, all appear so mystical, unreal..

Franz Marc