Grazing Horses IV

Grazing Horses IV (1911) is one of the key works in Franz Marc's celebrated sequence of horse paintings that rank among the defining images of German Expressionism. Marc was convinced that the horse embodied a spiritual purity that modern industrial civilisation had lost, and his repeated return to equine subjects represented a sustained meditation on this idea. By 1911 Marc had fully developed his colour symbolism and his method of dissolving animal forms into prismatic colour fields, and this work shows those ideas at their most fluid and assured. The Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard, which specialises in German art, holds the painting as a significant example of the Blaue Reiter aesthetic. The series allowed Marc to explore variations on the same spiritual subject while testing different colour combinations and compositional approaches — a systematic method that reflects his serious theoretical engagement with his practice and with the philosophical ambitions he shared with

Marc builds the horses from colour planes rather than naturalistic drawing, using his symbolic palette to generate both visual rhythm and spiritual meaning. The forms interlock with the landscape elements, avoiding the conventional separation of subject and setting.