Animal Legend (Tierlegende)

Animal Legend (Tierlegende) is a powerful woodcut created by Franz Marc in 1912. This key work exemplifies the spiritual themes and formal experimentation characteristic of the German Expressionist movement during the period of 1901 to 1925. As a print, the technique utilized the harsh, bold lines inherent in the woodcut process, which lent itself perfectly to the raw, urgent emotionality Marc sought to convey.

Marc, a founding member of the influential Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group, utilized animals not merely as subjects but as spiritual metaphors for universal harmony and purity. In Animal Legend (Tierlegende), the composition depicts stylized, interlocked animal forms, reflecting the artist’s concurrent movement toward greater abstraction. While many of his famous paintings relied heavily on symbolic color, this piece explores form through dynamic, rhythmic patterning. The expressive intensity achieved through the high-contrast lines firmly places the work within the canon of Expressionist prints. This phase of Marc's career shows his intense engagement with primitivism and his search for an art that transcended the material world, a common thread among German avant-garde artists seeking a spiritual renewal in the early twentieth century.

This significant example of early modernist prints is part of the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art. The woodcut serves as a crucial document of Marc’s brief but highly influential Expressionist period before his tragic death in World War I. For researchers and enthusiasts of early twentieth-century art, high-quality images of this work are often made available through public domain initiatives by institutions globally, ensuring that the legacy of masters like Marc continues to inform contemporary understanding of German artistic innovation.