Contemporary artists in search of a lost masterpiece

MUNICH.- There are few masterpieces of modern art with a history as tumultuous as Franz Marc’s painting Der Turm der blauen Pferde (1913). Held alternately in Munich and Berlin, the painting forged a link between these two important artistic centres. It was nearly destroyed, then saved and once again held securely, only to disappear without trace following the Second World War. To this day, art historians and historians continue to ask: where is Der Turm der blauen Pferde?

This question is at the centre of speculations by a group of artists from Berlin and Munich, the results of which are presented in two parallel exhibitions.

Franz Marc painted this piece in the countryside near Munich in the spring of 1913, exhibiting it later that year. Following his death in the First World War, the painting was displayed prominently in 1919 at the commemorative exhibition of the New Munich Secession. In the same year it was purchased for an unusually high price by Ludwig Justi on behalf of the ‘New Department’ of the Berlin Nationalgalerie.

Branded ‘degenerate’ in 1937 and removed from public museum ownership, it was displayed for a few days that summer in the first section of the Degenerate Art exhibition at the Hofgartenarkaden in Munich. Thanks to the determined protests of individual citizens, the work was quietly removed from display, returned to a Berlin collection depot for processing as ‘degenerate art’, and then retained by Hermann Göring, passing eventually into his (illegal) ownership. Not long after the end of the Second World War, there were reported additional sightings in Berlin of Der Turm der blauen Pferde in 1945 and 1948/9 respectively. Independently of one another, three significant witnesses saw the picture at Leipziger Platz, in a building later known as the Haus am Waldsee, and finally on the opposite side of the lake in the Haus der Jugend in Berlin-Zehlendorf. All traces of the painting disappear after this.

The Haus am Waldsee in Berlin and the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München have invited 20 internationally renowned contemporary artists to offer a modern-day appraisal of the history of the painting, featured in a double exhibition encompassing painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, installation art, and literature.

The Postcard
A postcard-sized drawing, created before the painting, serves as the starting point of these artistic enquiries. Franz Marc titled the drawing Der Turm der blauen Pferde and sent it shortly before or after New Year 1913 to his close personal friend, the Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler. This ‘preliminary drawing’ saw the artist create the exact same composition and palette that he would subsequently use for the picture.

The effect of the postcard is that of a ‘phantom picture’, bearing witness to the past and at the same time to the possibility of the painting’s survival. The enduring popularity of the work derives in no small part from its disappearance, which inevitably appeals to our fascination for the invisible. In the home city of Der Turm der blauen Pferde, the luminous blue gouache has undoubtedly achieved the status of a holy relic: it serves as a screen against which people can project their feelings of romanticized nostalgia and reawaken their desire to see the original once more. A constellation of circumstances that can motivate and even fire up contemporary artists to apply the necessary levers and set this machinery of yearning in motion.

The Myth
Where, then, is Franz Marc’s Der Turm der blauen Pferde? A group of artists have set themselves the task of responding to this speculative question. The ensuing outcomes for the Munich side of the exhibition pursue a variety of lines of enquiry, using the preserved ‘preliminary drawing’ as the starting point from which to examine the myth of the missing picture, and seeking to account for the work’s enduring (and ongoing) aesthetic appeal, while pondering the open-ended questions and sometimes far-fetched conclusions that surround the picture’s story. They invite visitors to take up and pursue the various threads of the conversation.

Creative Responses of the Artists in Munich
The fact that these artistic investigations yield more questions than answers should be understood as an inevitable consequence of contemporary discourse.

Hence it is hardly surprising that Der Turm der blauen Pferde in the large- scale drawing by Slawomir Elsner remains hazy, generating a sense of thematic autonomy by its very intangibility. Responding to the same question, Jana Gunstheimer has created an installation that showcases what remains of a picture after years of wear and age, a fading memory and a secondary, transformed existence emerging in its place. The idea of emotional transience is explored by Almut Hilf, whose contribution to the project comprises a design for a spatial collage that integrates views of the historical locations in which the painting was once exhibited: the Sezession in Munich (1916), the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin (1920), and the Munich Hofgartenarkaden (1937).

The painting itself, however, which contributed to the respective genius loci of these locations, is omitted. Thus the work calls upon our imaginative powers, even at the risk of us being unequal to the challenge.

Der Turm der blauen Pferde is featured – like many famous paintings – as a mere subject pasted on industrially-produced consumer goods, taking on an uncontrollable life of its own as part of a global network of innumerable copies. Viktoria Binschtok explores this phenomenon in her work by restaging merchandising products.

The artist uses her series to investigate the extent to which low-resolution digital-image data can fade away, as reproductions are in turn reproduced, while our modern viewing habits – paired down to focus upon key stimuli – mean that we barely perceive what is brought before our eyes. Her work thus reflects the contemporary status of the picture. Phenomena such as these were preceded historically by the erstwhile ‘classical’/analogue consumption of images, which Dieter Blume evokes with a billboard-sized photograph of a herd of wild horses. The myth of an idealized longing for freedom, which forms one aspect of Franz Marc’s masterpiece, is here taken apart with profane immediacy and duly examined, while the observer is simultaneously compelled to ask him or herself whether the image of wild horses, even when seen without the accompanying Marlboro advertising slogan, is now definitively associated with the consumer product.

References to war, which appear in Der Turm der blauen Pferde and reflect one aspect of 20th century German history, are explored in the works of Tatjana Doll and Thomas Kilpper, while the contribution of Dierk Schmidt unveils the historical and psychological relationships that have crystallized around a work once branded ‘degenerate’.
What resonates in different ways with all the works created for the exhibition is Klaus Lankheit’s enigmatic dictum: ‘An old piece of wisdom says that every people has the art it deserves. Did Der Turm der blauen Pferde vanish because we no longer appeared sufficiently evolved for what it requires of us?’

Creative Responses by the Artists in Berlin
The exhibition at the Berlin Haus am Waldsee deals primarily with the loss of the painting, the rumours surrounding its disappearance and the hushed silence of the post-war period. The photographer Johanna Diehl, for instance, ponders over that silence, which she renders visible as if through a murky veil, taking the example of her own family’s history. Other artists invent new rumours surrounding the painting that point to the USA or to the Netherlands (Marcel van Eeden), or decide to copy and damage the artwork (Norbert Bisky). Some artists address the subject of loss as a blank (Arturo Herrera, Christian Jankowski) or as the moment of the painter’s death (Rémy Markowitsch, Birgit Brenner), which has greatly contributed to the painting’s myth.

The show is about the dust of history settling, about continuities of philosophical outlooks, ideologies and shadows of the past (Peter Rösel) or, indeed, about the question of what would happen, if Der Turm der blauen Pferde suddenly re- emerged (Via Lewandowsky). A neon sign outdoors reminds us of the fact that there is no certainty, that everything could be different (Tobias Rehberger). Finally, a literary text by Julia Franck circles the relationship between Else Lasker-Schüler and her artist friend Franz Marc. She had some influence on the creation of Der Turm der blauen Pferde in 1913. Was it painted for her?

After all, the postcard with the preliminary drawing was made for her in 1912. Martin Assig sets in motion an intimate religious conversation. He enlists the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation to tell his story about the painting, which culminates in the imploring call of "Komm, komm, komm" (come, come, come) that conjugates the mourning of its loss.

A catalogue in German and English with texts by Katja Blomberg, Michael Hering, Stefan Koldehoff, Roland März and Christian Welzbacher will be published with Walther König Books, 24,80 Euro.

In 2018, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam will host the joint exhibition.

Curator in Munich: Dr. Michael Hering.