Between Idyll and Doom – Franz Marc’s Journey to Tyrol

Spring 1913:
a journey into a different world

In spring 1913, Franz Marc and his partner, Maria Franck, travelled from Sindelsdorf to South Tyrol to visit Maria’s father in a Merano sanatorium. The journey proved to be a profound experience for Marc. Once over the Brenner Pass, a new landscape spread out before him: the Karwendel mountains, with their untamed valleys and lofty peaks. This natural region left a deep and lasting impression on him.

Marc was fascinated by this Alpine world. He captured his impressions in his sketchbooks, not in a naturalistic style, but in rhythmic lines, throbs of colour, inner states. Returning to his studio, he drew on the journey as inspiration for several works that are now regarded as the most important of his late artistic phase.

The Long Yellow Horse –
a sign of uncertain times

The Long Yellow Horse (1913) transforms the landscape into a stage, the animal into a symbol. A lone horse stands on a path, tense and taut, framed by shades of yellow and architecture devoid of human presence

A clear composition, yet unsettling: has the horse been abandoned? Is it waiting for something? Or is it, like the world, facing emptiness?

Horses were long a central subject for Franz Marc; he saw them as expressions of purity, motion, inner life. In 1913, this symbolism darkened; the figure of the horse now appeared more fragile, more isolated. The work exudes ambivalence, between hope and paralysis, between new departures and disintegration. It is a work of transition in both form and content.

The shadow of history:
Balkan Wars and premonitions of war.

In 1913, the Second Balkan War raged on the edge of Europe. Fighting was brutal; the political situation was volatile. Europe was swept by a growing premonition that greater conflict lay ahead, and artists were likewise beset by trepidation.

Franz Marc captured these moods and transformed them into powerful, symbolically charged imagery. The Poor Country of Tyrol (1913) portrays a ravaged landscape, starving horses and a cemetery studded with crosses, in sombre shades. A small border sign can be seen at the lower edge as a subtle, yet pointed reference to political tensions and the fragility of national territories.

This depiction of Tyrol is in fact a metaphor for the destructive force of time. It was painted in the same year as The Long Yellow Horse; both works reflect differing responses to the same historical moment, one introverted and abstract, the other gloomy and corporeal.

Tyrol – Landscape of apocalyptic vision

On the eve of the First World War, Marc painted a further major work: Tyrol. It shows a looming mountain landscape with a figure of the Virgin Mary at its centre, alongside a small white chapel and two tiny farms. No animals. Only a bare, black tree topped with a sickle-shaped branch – a mutation of nature, or perhaps even a weapon.

Here, the Alpine idyll has become a hostile setting. The religious symbols of the Virgin Mary and the chapel appear defenceless, almost lost. As carefully constructed as the work appears, it is permeated by premonition. It concisely renders a vision of a world on the edge of radical change.

From experience to insight – Marc’s hope of war and disillusion

Like many intellectuals of his age, Franz Marc initially believed that war could be a cleansing force for »paralysed« bourgeois society, bringing destructive, yet necessary upheaval. This belief was soon overtaken by a more realistic view. Franz Marc fell in Verdun in 1916, deeply disillusioned, ground down by the reality of war that he had once perceived as a creative force.

However, the works that emerged from his journey to Tyrol remain as documents of an artistic and political threshold, portraying not only nature and animals, but a world sensing that it faced radical change.