The blue foals

The Blue Foals (1913) at the Kunsthalle in Emden revisits Franz Marc's most celebrated symbolic colour — blue — applied to young horses, subjects that combine his two most characteristic concerns: equine spirituality and the vulnerability of new life. Blue, in Marc's theoretical framework, represented masculine spirituality and the aspiration toward the transcendent; foals — young, unformed, close to the origin of being — embodied a spiritual freshness that adult animals might lose to habit and earthly entanglement. The Kunsthalle in Emden holds one of Germany's strongest collections of Expressionism, and The Blue Foals represents a summation of Marc's colour philosophy applied to a subject of personal and symbolic significance. By 1913 the Blaue Reiter group had held its famous first exhibition in Munich and published its landmark almanac, both co-organised by Marc and Kandinsky. The blue horse had become so identified with Marc's practice by this point that it functioned almost as a signature. This late use of the motif shows how far formal fragmentation had advanced since the cleaner, more naturalistic Blue Horse I of 1911 — the foals here are embedded in a landscape of interlocking prismatic planes that threaten to dissolve their contours entirely.

Oil on canvas with deep ultramarine and cobalt blue tones dominating both the animal figures and their surrounding landscape. The foals' forms are constructed from interlocking colour planes, with warm orange and yellow accents providing chromatic counterpoint in the ground.