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Lot Essay
Painted in 1912, Katzen, Rot und Weiß is a classic example of the pioneering series of visionary paintings focusing on animals immersed in their natural environment that occupied Franz Marc intensely in the years leading up to the First World War. Depicting an idyllic scene in which two cats are nestled together within the soft, rolling contours of a verdant landscape, the painting showcases Marc’s unique ability to capture his subjects ‘in their highest lives, in the intensified expression of their peculiar energy’ (Hermann Nohl in his speech at the opening of the exhibition ‘Tierbild-Ausstellung. Franz Marc, Walter Klemm, Rudolf Schramm-Zittau, Alfons Purtscher,’ in Jena in February 1913; quoted in A. Hoberg and H. Friedel, Franz Marc: The Retrospective, exh. cat., Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, 2005, p. 42). Acquired by Elinor Heins in 1970, the painting has remained in her family for the past fifty-five years, and comes to auction for the first time in its history.
By 1912, Marc was fully immersed in the avant-garde art circles of Munich, thanks to his stimulating friendship with one of the most progressive and forward-looking painters of the period—Wassily Kandinsky. Through their prolific correspondence and regular meetings, Marc and Kandinsky fuelled one another’s progressive thinking on the purpose and potential of art. With a shared missionary zeal, they began preparations for a project they named the Blaue Reiter Almanac, a publication intended to reflect not only the diversity of contemporary art across Europe, but which would also promote the notion that artists across the continent were driven by the same impulse, connected across styles, disciplines and distance, in their search for an inner spirit or ‘essence.’ In this now legendary publication, the two painters acted as editors, inviting artists to contribute essays, and choosing a selection of illustrations that showed the most modern, revolutionary artworks alongside objects from ancient civilizations and non-traditional art forms. In this way, the publication aimed to simultaneously offer what Kandinsky described as ‘a link to the past and a pointer to the future’ (quoted in H. Friedel and A. Hoberg, The Blue Rider in the Lenbachhaus, Munich, Munich, 2000, p. 43).
Like Kandinsky, the search for the spiritual, for a truth that lay beyond our perceived reality, stood at the very heart of Marc’s artistic ambition, rooted in his desire to overcome what he saw as the toxic materialism of the industrialised, modern world. For Marc, animals represented the perfect subject through which these concepts could be explored—in his eyes, these creatures enjoyed a purer existence than humans, and were therefore more in tune with the cosmic forces of the universe, driven by what he believed to be their unconscious and innately spiritual understanding of the world. ‘What can be more mysterious to the artist than the idea of how nature is mirrored in the eyes of an animal?’ he once famously asked. ‘How does a horse see the world, or an eagle, a deer, a dog? How impoverished and soulless our convention is of placing animals in a landscape which belongs to our eyes, instead of empathizing with the soul of the animal in order to understand its view of the world’ (quoted in ibid., cat. 46, n.p.).
Between 1911 and 1914, Marc focused almost exclusively on animal subjects, reaching a new expressive idiom as he reduced their forms to simple silhouettes, heightened his palette, and achieved a greater fusion between the creature and their environment. He spent hours studying their movements and forms, at home, in the fields around his studio, in the nearby woods, and even the zoo, where he sketched bears, tigers and elephants. From these studies, Marc built up a rich lexicon of forms, which he then used to extrapolate the interior ‘essence’ of his animal subjects. Often arranged in rhythmic, interconnected groups, he represented these characters in deep communion with nature, creating captivating images that speak to the intimate, symbiotic union between the two.
Writing about Marc’s approach to painting in the 1930s, Kandinsky highlighted his friend’s unique personal affinity for his subjects: ‘Marc had a direct, intimate relationship with nature like a mountaineer or even an animal. Sometimes I felt as if even nature herself was gratified to see him. Everything in nature attracted him, but above all, the animals. Here there was a reciprocal contact between the artist and his “models,” and this is why Marc could enter into the lives of animals; it was their life that gave him his inspiration. […] What attracted him was the great organic whole, that is to say, nature in general. Here lies the key to the original, individual world Marc created and which others have tried to re-create, but without success’ (‘Franz Marc,’ in Cahiers d’Art, nos. 5-10, Paris, 1936; quoted in Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke: Drawings and Watercolours, exh. cat., New York, 1969, p. viii).
The cat was a significant recurring character within Marc’s animal paintings during these years, at once domestic and familiar, yet mysterious and mercurial. In works such as Mädchen mit Katze II (1912, Hoberg and Jansen, no. 173; Private collection) he portrays their fond connection with humans—based on a spontaneous tempera study of the artist’s wife Maria with their kitten Rudi, the cat’s small curving form is nestled in the woman’s lap, as they appear to play together. In contrast, paintings like Kinderbild (Katze hinter einem Baum) (1910-1911, Hoberg and Jansen, no. 135; Private collection) revel in the wilder side of their nature, placing the lithe, ginger cat in an undulating landscape, the sinuous lines of its body finding direct echoes in the surrounding woods. In Katzen, Rot und Weiß, meanwhile, the physical closeness of the two felines lends the scene a sense of intimacy and partnership, as their bodies wrap around one another, almost converging at points. Beneath them, softly delineated patches of indigo and yellow recall Marc’s musings on colour theory, and suggest a male-female dichotomy in their pairing: ‘Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual,’ he wrote. ‘Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual…’ (quoted in V. Endicott Barnett, Franz Marc and August Macke: 1909-1914, exh. cat., The Neue Galerie, New York, 2018, p. 50).
Shortly after its completion, Katzen, Rot und Weiß was dispatched to the Galerie Heinrich Thannhauser, where it was included in an exhibition dedicated to Marc’s recent paintings. According to an entry in the artist’s notebook, the painting was sold in January 1913 to a collector by the name of Levin in Berlin, who some scholars have suggested may in fact be a reference to Georg Lewin, better known at the time by his pseudonym, Herwarth Walden. Walden was a key figure within the German avant-garde at this time, a forward-thinking publisher, critic and gallerist who championed the daring work of the Expressionists, the Cubists and the Futurists. He was also an important early supporter and close friend to Marc, featuring the artist’s work in his seminal periodical, Der Sturm, on numerous occasions. In the same month that Katzen, Rot und Weiß was painted, Marc was in Cologne, assisting Walden with the hanging of his acclaimed exhibition of Futurist paintings at the Gereons-Club. The present work may have been among the recent paintings by the artist included in the show Vierzehnte Ausstellung, Franz Marc Gemälde held at Walden’s Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin in the spring of 1913, which subsequently travelled to Hamburg and Amsterdam.
In his review of the Der Sturm exhibition in Berlin, the critic Adolf Behne praised Marc’s unique talents, heralding him as an important voice of Expressionism: ‘Marc’s pictures are deeply and intimately rooted in nature. Indeed, I must confess that I would be hard put to name another contemporary painter with such an ability to move us and to lead us into the innermost depths of nature. The innermost depths—that is precisely the point! The outward appearance, the outward form, the outward correctness of nature—they mean nothing to him. What concerns him is the hidden presentiment, the inner life, the soul, the pulse of nature! In terms of the intensity of feeling which his magnificent paintings evoke, Franz Marc is a worker of miracles!’ (quoted in H. Friedel and A. Hoberg, op. cit., 2000, cat. 50, n.p.).
Katzen, Rot und Weiß was acquired by the late Elinor Heins in January 1970, from Galerie Dr Rainer Horstmann. Elinor had begun her collecting journey in the summer of 1966, with a vibrant watercolour by Emil Nolde, and over the following decades built a discerning and highly personal collection that included sculpture, paintings, works on paper and lithographs by the likes of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Signac, Edvard Munch, Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso. ‘The selection and decision-making process was always wonderful and inspiring,’ she explained, ‘but also hard work.’
In particular, Elinor’s love of Expressionist art ensured it became a strong focal point within the collection—Marc and August Macke were among her favourite artists, and paintings by leading figures of both the Blaue Reiter and the Brücke groups hung alongside one another in her home in Montreux, Switzerland. In 2005, she loaned Katzen, Rot und Weiß to the seminal Franz Marc retrospective, held at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich. In 2024, thirty works from the Heins collection were generously gifted to the Dallas Museum of Art by her family, in memory of Elinor’s abiding passion for art.
By 1912, Marc was fully immersed in the avant-garde art circles of Munich, thanks to his stimulating friendship with one of the most progressive and forward-looking painters of the period—Wassily Kandinsky. Through their prolific correspondence and regular meetings, Marc and Kandinsky fuelled one another’s progressive thinking on the purpose and potential of art. With a shared missionary zeal, they began preparations for a project they named the Blaue Reiter Almanac, a publication intended to reflect not only the diversity of contemporary art across Europe, but which would also promote the notion that artists across the continent were driven by the same impulse, connected across styles, disciplines and distance, in their search for an inner spirit or ‘essence.’ In this now legendary publication, the two painters acted as editors, inviting artists to contribute essays, and choosing a selection of illustrations that showed the most modern, revolutionary artworks alongside objects from ancient civilizations and non-traditional art forms. In this way, the publication aimed to simultaneously offer what Kandinsky described as ‘a link to the past and a pointer to the future’ (quoted in H. Friedel and A. Hoberg, The Blue Rider in the Lenbachhaus, Munich, Munich, 2000, p. 43).
Like Kandinsky, the search for the spiritual, for a truth that lay beyond our perceived reality, stood at the very heart of Marc’s artistic ambition, rooted in his desire to overcome what he saw as the toxic materialism of the industrialised, modern world. For Marc, animals represented the perfect subject through which these concepts could be explored—in his eyes, these creatures enjoyed a purer existence than humans, and were therefore more in tune with the cosmic forces of the universe, driven by what he believed to be their unconscious and innately spiritual understanding of the world. ‘What can be more mysterious to the artist than the idea of how nature is mirrored in the eyes of an animal?’ he once famously asked. ‘How does a horse see the world, or an eagle, a deer, a dog? How impoverished and soulless our convention is of placing animals in a landscape which belongs to our eyes, instead of empathizing with the soul of the animal in order to understand its view of the world’ (quoted in ibid., cat. 46, n.p.).
Between 1911 and 1914, Marc focused almost exclusively on animal subjects, reaching a new expressive idiom as he reduced their forms to simple silhouettes, heightened his palette, and achieved a greater fusion between the creature and their environment. He spent hours studying their movements and forms, at home, in the fields around his studio, in the nearby woods, and even the zoo, where he sketched bears, tigers and elephants. From these studies, Marc built up a rich lexicon of forms, which he then used to extrapolate the interior ‘essence’ of his animal subjects. Often arranged in rhythmic, interconnected groups, he represented these characters in deep communion with nature, creating captivating images that speak to the intimate, symbiotic union between the two.
Writing about Marc’s approach to painting in the 1930s, Kandinsky highlighted his friend’s unique personal affinity for his subjects: ‘Marc had a direct, intimate relationship with nature like a mountaineer or even an animal. Sometimes I felt as if even nature herself was gratified to see him. Everything in nature attracted him, but above all, the animals. Here there was a reciprocal contact between the artist and his “models,” and this is why Marc could enter into the lives of animals; it was their life that gave him his inspiration. […] What attracted him was the great organic whole, that is to say, nature in general. Here lies the key to the original, individual world Marc created and which others have tried to re-create, but without success’ (‘Franz Marc,’ in Cahiers d’Art, nos. 5-10, Paris, 1936; quoted in Kandinsky, Franz Marc, August Macke: Drawings and Watercolours, exh. cat., New York, 1969, p. viii).
The cat was a significant recurring character within Marc’s animal paintings during these years, at once domestic and familiar, yet mysterious and mercurial. In works such as Mädchen mit Katze II (1912, Hoberg and Jansen, no. 173; Private collection) he portrays their fond connection with humans—based on a spontaneous tempera study of the artist’s wife Maria with their kitten Rudi, the cat’s small curving form is nestled in the woman’s lap, as they appear to play together. In contrast, paintings like Kinderbild (Katze hinter einem Baum) (1910-1911, Hoberg and Jansen, no. 135; Private collection) revel in the wilder side of their nature, placing the lithe, ginger cat in an undulating landscape, the sinuous lines of its body finding direct echoes in the surrounding woods. In Katzen, Rot und Weiß, meanwhile, the physical closeness of the two felines lends the scene a sense of intimacy and partnership, as their bodies wrap around one another, almost converging at points. Beneath them, softly delineated patches of indigo and yellow recall Marc’s musings on colour theory, and suggest a male-female dichotomy in their pairing: ‘Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual,’ he wrote. ‘Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual…’ (quoted in V. Endicott Barnett, Franz Marc and August Macke: 1909-1914, exh. cat., The Neue Galerie, New York, 2018, p. 50).
Shortly after its completion, Katzen, Rot und Weiß was dispatched to the Galerie Heinrich Thannhauser, where it was included in an exhibition dedicated to Marc’s recent paintings. According to an entry in the artist’s notebook, the painting was sold in January 1913 to a collector by the name of Levin in Berlin, who some scholars have suggested may in fact be a reference to Georg Lewin, better known at the time by his pseudonym, Herwarth Walden. Walden was a key figure within the German avant-garde at this time, a forward-thinking publisher, critic and gallerist who championed the daring work of the Expressionists, the Cubists and the Futurists. He was also an important early supporter and close friend to Marc, featuring the artist’s work in his seminal periodical, Der Sturm, on numerous occasions. In the same month that Katzen, Rot und Weiß was painted, Marc was in Cologne, assisting Walden with the hanging of his acclaimed exhibition of Futurist paintings at the Gereons-Club. The present work may have been among the recent paintings by the artist included in the show Vierzehnte Ausstellung, Franz Marc Gemälde held at Walden’s Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin in the spring of 1913, which subsequently travelled to Hamburg and Amsterdam.
In his review of the Der Sturm exhibition in Berlin, the critic Adolf Behne praised Marc’s unique talents, heralding him as an important voice of Expressionism: ‘Marc’s pictures are deeply and intimately rooted in nature. Indeed, I must confess that I would be hard put to name another contemporary painter with such an ability to move us and to lead us into the innermost depths of nature. The innermost depths—that is precisely the point! The outward appearance, the outward form, the outward correctness of nature—they mean nothing to him. What concerns him is the hidden presentiment, the inner life, the soul, the pulse of nature! In terms of the intensity of feeling which his magnificent paintings evoke, Franz Marc is a worker of miracles!’ (quoted in H. Friedel and A. Hoberg, op. cit., 2000, cat. 50, n.p.).
Katzen, Rot und Weiß was acquired by the late Elinor Heins in January 1970, from Galerie Dr Rainer Horstmann. Elinor had begun her collecting journey in the summer of 1966, with a vibrant watercolour by Emil Nolde, and over the following decades built a discerning and highly personal collection that included sculpture, paintings, works on paper and lithographs by the likes of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Signac, Edvard Munch, Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso. ‘The selection and decision-making process was always wonderful and inspiring,’ she explained, ‘but also hard work.’
In particular, Elinor’s love of Expressionist art ensured it became a strong focal point within the collection—Marc and August Macke were among her favourite artists, and paintings by leading figures of both the Blaue Reiter and the Brücke groups hung alongside one another in her home in Montreux, Switzerland. In 2005, she loaned Katzen, Rot und Weiß to the seminal Franz Marc retrospective, held at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich. In 2024, thirty works from the Heins collection were generously gifted to the Dallas Museum of Art by her family, in memory of Elinor’s abiding passion for art.