The Birth of Horses 1913

Franz Marc made this vibrant woodcut print, "The Birth of Horses," using blocks of color – earthy browns, greens, blacks, and reds. I can almost feel him carving into that block, figuring out how to make these shapes emerge. It’s not just a picture of horses; it’s like a puzzle of feelings about them. You get the sense of this animal spirit coming into being. Marc’s probably thinking about how to make these animals *feel* alive on the page. Those bold black lines trap the energy of the figures, but everything seems to move, twist. It reminds me a bit of Picasso's cubist paintings, where shapes break apart and come back together in unexpected ways. And in a way, that's what artists do all the time. We mess around with what we see, and then we mess around with what *we* made, until it shows something more, something beyond the everyday world. It's a conversation that artists have been having for centuries, and Marc’s right in the thick of it.