Franz Marc as a WWI German artillery camoufleur

Franz Marc, Animals in a Forest

Above Franz Marc, Animals in a Forest (1914). In earlier paintings by Marc, figures are easily distinguished from their backgrounds. As his work evolved, animals and landscapes increasingly merged, progressing toward embedded figures. 

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Tim Newark, Camouflage. London: Thames and Hudson, 2007, p. 68—

[During World War I, the German army] recruited artists to disguise their weaponry. The most famous of these was Franz Marc, an Expressionist painter who served initially as a cavalryman. He wrote a revealing letter to his wife in February 1916 in which he told of the creative pleasure he derived from painting military tarpaulins by adapting the styles of great modern painters.

“The business has a totally practical purpose,” said Marc, “to hide artillery emplacements from airborne spotters and photography by covering them with tarpaulins in roughly pointillistic designs in the manner of bright natural camouflage. The distances which one has to reckon with are enormous—from an average height of 2000 meters—enemy aircraft never flies much lower than that…I am curious what effect the ‘Kandinskys’ will have at 2000 meters. The nine tarpaulins chart a development ‘from Manet to Kandinsky.’” 

Franz Marc (1910)

 

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