Blue Horse With Rainbow Essay

Franz Marc was a German expressionist and one of the founders of the Der Blue Reiter movement.   This work, “Blue Horse with Rainbow” or “Blaues Pferd mit Regenbogen” in German, is part of the expressionist technique used by Marc. Artists tended to hold a more apocalyptic attitude toward civilizations and used colors as symbols for other things rather than just show it in their true colors. Franz Marc made this work in 1913 through using watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper.
This work is a very colorful one with many different shapes as well. There is a blue horse in the right side of the work and two rainbows along with many other shapes and colors that can be seen as different things.   There is also an object in the top left that looks like a moon painted green.
There seems to be a few different elements of style used by Marc in this work. The colors definitely are symbolic for different things. The horse is blue that usually represents being spiritual. Marc’s works generally showed the animals as simple and spiritual which this work does with the blue coloring.   The rainbow shows the beauty of the earth but also the rigid lines cutting through them can mean the broken way the earth was at the time he painted it. These rigid lines are much like the industrial cities that were developing and could be shown as society versus spirituality in the rainbow and blue horse.   He could be showing that even a rainbow can be cut up and ruined by the society and humans in society. The red on the earth can also go towards this idea because red is usually used to show heaviness and is brutal. These could show how society is brutal to even the best things such as rainbows or horses.   The moon, being very large, could also be seen as the idea that “night” could fall on society if they do not become simple again like the blue horse. The colors also lead me to feeling happy and confused at the same time. The happiness comes from the rainbows and the blue horse but the...