Franz Marc's 1911 painting Deer in the Woods II depicts an abstracted landscape with a sleeping deer. The painting combines recognizable subjects with blocks of saturated color in a dreamlike style. The document compares Deer in the Woods II to works by Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandinsky, and Helen Frankenthaler to show how it reflects trends in early 20th century modernism like post-impressionism, expressionism, and abstract expressionism through its use of unnatural color, blurred forms, and focus on nature. Comparing the painting to works spanning over 60 years provides context for Franz Marc's style and the progression of modern art toward abstraction.

1. Kelly Richman
October 2015
Prompt:
Suggest comparative images for Franz Marc’s Deer in the Woods II, 1911.

2. Franz Marc and Modernism:
Contextualising Deer in the Woods II within Twentieth-Century Art
‘Is there a more mysterious idea for an artist than the conception of how nature is
mirrored in the eyes of an animal? How does a horse see the world, or an eagle, or a doe, or a
dog?”1
– Franz Marc
Created at the height of the heavily saturated and deeply stylised Expressionist
Movement, Franz Marc’s Deer in the Woods II, 1911 (Figure 1) is equally a depiction of its
animal subject as it is a hint toward abstraction. Portraying a single, slumbering deer amid rolling
rainbow hills and starkly contrasted trees, Deer in the Woods II is one of many paintings
completed by Marc that portray flora and fauna as his muse and “draw the viewer into the world
of their animal protagonists.”2
While undeniably a Marc creation, Deer in the Woods II also
aesthetically speaks to the work of other twentieth-century artists who preceded, followed, and
even worked contemporaneously beside him. In order to trace the stylistic similarities and artistic
considerations throughout the Modern Art movement, it is worth comparing this piece to the
work of three renowned artists: Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin, fellow Expressionist Wassily
Kandinsky, and post-war Colour Field painter Helen Frankenthaler.
Comprised of blended forms and evoking a dreamlike atmosphere, Deer in the Woods II
combines recognizable subjects with seemingly arbitrary blocks of colour. In the foreground, a
yellow deer curls up in the grass; with her head folded atop her body, she is a sleek form among
planes of hazy hues. Before her sits the painting’s only other recognizable form: a suspended tree
branch. In the background, planes of orange, yellow, pink, purple, green, and white ground the
scene. Indistinguishable, abstract foliage frames the composition, and contrasting colours suggest
depth by receding into darkness. While the bright and bold doe-in-the-trees motif is repeatedly
revisited by Marc – as evident in The Red Deer, 1912 (Figure 2) and Deer in the Forest, 1914
(Figure 3) – the piece’s woodland theme and exaggerated use of colour also convey a strong
likeness to another well-known artist: Paul Gauguin.
A key figure of the Post-Impressionist movement, Gauguin is known for his artificial
colour palette and the primitive documentation of his mid-life exotic escape. While portrayals of
the beautiful Tahitian people – namely, of his young bride – most famously comprise his oeuvre,
Gauguin was also deeply inspired by the untouched local landscape. In Marquesan Landscape
1
Elizabeth H. Payne, ‘Animals in Landscape’, Bulletin Of The Detroit Institute Of Arts, vol. 36, no. 3,
1956-1957, p. 75.
2
Susanna Partsch, Franz Marc: 1880-1916, Taschen, 2001, p. 37.

3. with Horses, 1901 (Figure 4), the artist portrays the lush foliage and roaming wildlife of the
French Polynesian islands, as two horses are shown grazing upon purple grass under the shade of
a multi-coloured canopy. With nearly identical colour palettes and a shared regard for wild
nature, Deer in the Woods II and Marquesan Landscape with Horses are clearly comparable.
While, as a Post-Impressionist, Gauguin hardly dabbled in abstraction, he, on the heels of
Impressionism and the brink of Fauvism, was undeniably moving toward the style, as – just a
decade later – it would play a key role in the work of Marc and his Expressionist contemporaries,
like Wassily Kandinsky.
A pioneer of abstraction, Russian-born Kandinsky is renowned for his exuberant use of
colour and innate interest in the relationship between line, shape, and space. Along with Marc,
Kandinsky was a key member of Der Blaue Reiter group, an avant garde assembly of
Expressionist artists founded in 1911. Like Gauguin, Kandinsky and Der Blaue Reiter group
“tended to pursue a kind of a spirituality or transcendence seeming to offer itself in the
unexploited mythopoetic integrity of primitive art.”3
With a focus on ethereality and intrinsic
spontaneity, Kandinsky’s Murnau with a Church, 1910 (Figure 5) illustrates the Der Blaue Reiter
group’s distinctive aesthetic and, unsurprisingly, bears striking similarities to Deer in the Woods
II. Like Marc’s piece, Murnau with a Church – with its quick brushstrokes and pieced together
planes of colour – embodies the impulsive, seemingly arbitrary style favoured by the group.
Furthermore, like Deer in the Woods II, Kandinsky’s piece merges absolute abstraction with a
recognizable subject: in this case, the erect steeple of a church. While the latter’s colour palette is
more vivid and varied, both pieces feature blended, almost watercolour-like patches of unnatural
tones. Furthermore, unlike Kandinsky’s well-known later work, Murnau with a Church does not
feature black outlines, geometric shapes, or a stark backdrop; it demonstrates, rather, an
undeniable relationship to the distinctive style of his contemporaries – including, of course, Marc.
In addition to his predecessors and peers, Marc also evidently had a similar style and
aesthetic to modern artists to follow – including American painter Helen Frankenthaler. Not
typically compared to the primitive Expressionists, Frankenthaler worked in post-war abstraction.
A prominent figure of the Colour Field movement, Frankenthaler is known for her 1950s - 60s
soak-stain paintings4
– works created by transferring thinned acrylic paint onto unprimed, white
canvas. The result – blended washes of translucent colour – is not unlike the characteristically
3
Joseph Masheck, ‘Raw Art: Primitive Authenticity and German Expressionism’, Res: Anthropology And
Aesthetics, no. 4, Autumn, 1982, p. 105.
4
John Elderfield, ‘After a "Breakthrough": On the 1950s Paintings of Helen Frankenthaler’, MoMa, vol. 2,
no. 1 (Summer, 1989), p. 8-11.

4. hazy, colour block backgrounds of Franz Marc. This similarity is particularly evident when
comparing Marc’s Deer in the Woods II with Frankenthaler’s much later Tutti Frutti, 1966
(Figure 6). With strikingly similar colour palettes, the two works are aesthetically
complimentary. Additionally, with their patchwork planes, they are compositionally alike; in
fact, if one were to remove the sleeping deer, sloping tree branch, and surrounding foliage from
Deer in the Woods II, the piece could masquerade as an oil study or preliminary sketch for a
Frankenthaler soak-stain (Figure 7). Ultimately, though nearly fifty years apart, the pieces share
a notable – albeit highly overlooked – aesthetic, and again demonstrate Modern Art’s long and
crucial move toward abstraction.
Though Gauguin’s primitive landscape, Kandinsky’s energetic abstraction, and
Frankenthaler’s glowing, soak-stained canvas span over sixty years, they all represent the avant
garde rejection of realism and shift toward the non-pictorial – a notion that is clearly apparent
when explored with Franz Marc’s Deer in the Woods II. While each piece shares aesthetic
attributes with Deer in the Woods II – including colour palette, subject matter, composition, and
brushwork – it is the context that most closely binds them. The selected works comprise a
condensed and crucial timeline of 20th
century art, commencing at the onset of abstraction
following Impressionism and concluding with the radically abstract Post-War era. While each
work represents a different movement and significant genre of painting, they also contextualise
both the painting itself and, on a much larger scale, the Modern Art trajectory as a whole.

5. Figures:
Figure 1.
Franz Marc, Deer in the Forest II, 1911
Oil on Canvas, 51 x 39 ½ in. (129.5 x 100.5 cm.)

6. Figure 2.
Franz Marc, The Red Deer, 1912
Oil on Canvas, 39 2
⁄5 x 27 3
⁄5 in. (100 x 70 cm.)

7. Figure 3.
Franz Marc, Deer in the Forest, 1914
Oil on Canvas, 39 2
⁄5 x 39 3
⁄5 in. (110 x 100.5 cm.)

8. Figure 4.
Paul Gauguin, Marquesan Landscape with Horses, 1901
Oil on Canvas

9. Figure 5.
Wassily Kandinsky, Mirnau with a Church, 1910
Oil on Cardboard, 25 ½ x 19 4
⁄5 in. (64.7 x 50.2 cm.)

10. Figure 6.
Helen Frankenthaler, Tutti Frutti, 1966
Acrylic on Canvas, 117 x 69 in. (296 x 175 cm)

11. Figure 7.
Details from Deer in the Woods II and Tutti Frutti
Side-by-Side Comparisons

13. Bibliography:
Elderfield, John. ‘After a Breakthrough: On the 1950s Paintings of Helen Frankenthaler.’ MoMa,
vol. 2, no. 1 (Summer, 1989): 8-11.
Masheck, Joseph. ‘Raw Art: Primitive Authenticity and German Expressionism.’ Res:
Anthropology And Aesthetics, no. 4 (Autumn, 1982):105.
Partsch, Susanna. Franz Marc: 1880-1916. Taschen (2001): 37.
Payne, Elizabeth H. ‘Animals in Landscape.’ Bulletin Of The Detroit Institute Of Arts, vol. 36,
no. 3 (1956-1957): 75.