Introduction

  Der Sturm

  Correspondence

  Image Gallery

ELSE LASKER-SCHÜLER, FRANZ MARC AND DER STURM

Lasker-Schüler - Marc Correspondence

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The letters with which Lasker-Schüler introduces herself to Marc, are a coherent part of the poet's beloved practice of role playing and transgression of borders between art and reality. It seems as though it is impossible for her to present herself only once, with only one voice; instead Marc encounters a speaker that seems to be schizophrenically falling apart in front of his eyes. "Ich bin Jussuf der Prinz von Theben" - she announces to Marc, but only within brackets, as a belated explanation of the first ich, which is the grammatical subject of the sentence. Identity is lagging behind the speaking I, explaining it after the fact.

The second letter opens with a blatant paradox: "Ich weiss von nichts!" The rest of this communication unfolds this contradiction by establishing a split in the self: "Eine üble Person hat schon zweimal hinter meinem Rücken sich erlaubt Briefe zu schrieben mit meiner Namenunterschrift und genauer Handschrift." Having thus divided herself, the speaker can at once know of the existence of the first letter, demanding to have it back, and claim to know nothing. It is significant that the impersonation that Lasker-Schüler describes is carried out in writing. Writing (poetry) turns into the locus of the disintegration of the self. For Lasker-Schüler, Poetry is an impersonation of oneself, a creeping into one's own shoes.

The third letter presents itself as a resolution of the confusion. "Ich bin aus Galiläa, ging dann nach Bagdad, kam dann nach Theben. So erklert sich alles." How is everything to be explained through this itinerary of an imaginary journey, grafted from a conglomeration of myths and legends? And how is it related to the itinerary or geographical description with which the correspondence opens: "I have no road anymore, only ravines?"

Marc not only accepted his role within Lasker-Schüler's constructed fairytale-world and entered the correspondence as the blue rider; he also responded to another invitation that was enfolded in her letters - an invitation to a dialogue in images. It seems as though the postcards that Marc created for Lasker-Schüler were the only appropriate answer to the dramatic strokes with which she presented herself to him. By this I mean not only the fanciful, detailed world that was Lasker-Schüler's alternative to her life as a poor Jewish woman in Berlin, but also the graphic images with which she illustrated this fanciful stance towards reality. The letters are dotted with stars and comets, silhouettes of the city of Thebes and of the figures that inhabit it. Thus, Marc's postcards are a reply to a web of images, adding his own strings to the weaving.

The postcards are a homogenous part of Marc's oeuvre, in which animals played an important role. For Marc, animals were a means through which he could explore his interest in a religious sensibility of nature that the artist possesses.

Ich suche mein Empfinden für den organischen Rythmus aller Dinge zu steigern, suche mich pantheistisch einzufühlen in das Zittern und Rinnen des Blutes in der Natur, in die Bäumen, in den Tieren, in der Luft … Ich sehe kein glücklicheres Mittel zur "Animalisierung" der Kunst, wie ich es nennen möchte, als das Tierbild. Darum greife ich danach.

I want to increase my sensibility of the organic rhythm of all things, to pantheistically identify with the trembling and flowing of blood in nature, in the trees, in the animals, in the air… I can think of no better medium for the "Animalization" of art, as I propose to call it, than animal-pictures. Hence, I reach for them.

Of course, the interest in animals as a natural entity doesn't bring Marc to depict them naturalistically. Rather, his horses, calves and panthers are images of a subjectified Nature, a Nature that has been processed through the imagination and the palette of the artist. Marc uses stains of color, in some cases they blend into each other in an almost undifferentiated manner, in others they are separated by complementary - perhaps "negative" - stains of empty paper. His images are borne not out of meticulously drawn lines but out of masses of color that are spread out on the surface.

This gives a privileged role to colors, and Marc uses them elaborately, confronting the grayish-brown shades that usually form the background with the starkly differentiated primary colors in which his animal figures are clad. For example, in Zitronenpferd und Feuerochse der Prinzen Jussuff, (#6) a postcard that was sent on March 9th 1913, gradually changing shades of black, brown, gray and green enfold a horse and an ox - two stains of red and yellow demarcated by swift, blurred, black brushstrokes. But it is without a doubt the third of the primary colors, blue, that plays the leading part in Marc's postcards.