Grazing Horses IV

In 1911, deep in discussions with other members of the expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter and preoccupied with questions of color, Marc began work on Grazing Horses IV. Wishing to give form to inner experience and to free himself from formal constraints imposed by the outside world, he aimed to detach color from its descriptive function and assigned each primary color a specific symbolic value. As this painting’s numeric title suggests, Marc returned repeatedly to the horse as a subject. He became well known for his preoccupation with animals, seeing them as the embodiment of a better, purer world, the bringers of spiritual renewal to western culture.Grazing Horses IV became the artist’s first work to enter a museum collection, the same year it was made. Like Kirchner’s self-portrait on view in the adjacent gallery, the painting first belonged to the Folkwang Museum in Hagen (later in Essen), which was at the vanguard of contemporary art collecting in Germany at the time. The painting was removed from the collection in 1937 as part of the National Socialist campaign to rid German museums of “degenerate art.”