Girl's Head

Girl's Head (1906) is an early work by Franz Marc that predates his Expressionist breakthrough by several years, showing the artist still working within a more conventional academic and naturalistic tradition. Marc had studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and made his first trip to Paris in 1903, where he encountered Impressionism. The 1906 date places this work in the transitional phase between his academic training and the decisive radicalisations that came after his second Paris trip in 1907, when he encountered the work of Van Gogh and began moving toward his mature symbolic-colour idiom. Works like this are valuable for understanding Marc's development as an artist and demonstrating the conventional skills he possessed before choosing to abandon them for expressive purposes. The Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München holds the work as part of its documentation of Munich-based art.

The early work reflects academic training in its approach to form, light, and figure. The handling is more conventional than Marc's mature work, following traditional approaches to modelling and tonal construction.