Turm der blauen Pferde

'Turm der blauen Pferde' (Tower of Blue Horses) from 1913 is one of the most famous works in German Expressionism — or rather, it is famous as a lost masterpiece, its whereabouts unknown since the Second World War. The original large-format canvas was considered by Marc himself among his finest achievements, and its loss represents one of the most significant cultural casualties of twentieth-century European history. The work depicts four blue horses rising one above another in a vertical composition that is simultaneously a celebration of equine vitality and a monument to spiritual aspiration — the tower of horses reaching upward like a Gothic cathedral of living bodies. Marc's blue horses are perhaps his most iconic subject: blue carried the highest spiritual meaning in his colour symbolism, associated with the masculine, spiritual principle and with the transcendence of material existence. The horses do not stand in a landscape but seem to inhabit a mystical or archetypal space, their bodies patterned with the light and movement of a world perceived from within rather than observed from without. The Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich holds related works and studies, part of the effort to document what the original painting contained.

Oil on canvas — the original large format — with Marc's mature technique of bold colour planes and Cubist-influenced fragmentation of form. The blue horses would have been built up through layers of the deeply saturated blue that was Marc's most spiritually meaningful colour, with the horses' bodies described through intersecting planes of varying blue tonalities and contrasting colours.