Page 407 - The Secret Museum

THE NATIONAL GALLERY, ON MUSEUM Island in Berlin, is in what became East Berlin

when the Berlin Wall was built in 1961, to divide the city into a western, capitalist
sector and an eastern, socialist sector. When the wall went up, some of the National
Gallery’s collection ended up on one side of the wall, some on the other. A new
national gallery – the Neue Nationalgalerie – was built to house the collection in the
west. Both are still there, the old and the new.

A lot of the National Gallery’s collection was taken by the Nazis in their
‘Degenerate Art’ campaign was in 1937. Paintings were burned or, in many cases,
sold – auctioned in Switzerland and sold to buyers all over the world. Many

paintings have still not been handed back: a lot of the National Gallery’s collection is
missing.

One of the best of these missing paintings is The Tower of the Blue Horses
(DerTurm derblauen Pferde) by Franz Marc (1880–1916), a German Expressionist
painter and printmaker. No one knows where it is; it is listed in the gallery’s
catalogues, and there are a lot of rumours, but its location is a mystery. We do know
exactly what it looked like however, which is lucky, because it was unusual to
photograph in colour at the time. The painting shows four blue horses, one above the

other and they are shown in a landscape of boulder-like objects. A rainbow arcs
above them, painted in bright colours of red, orange, yellow and green.

Marc was a big fan of van Gogh:

Van Gogh is for me the most authentic, the greatest, the most poignant
painter I know. To paint a bit of the most ordinary nature, putting all one’s
faith and longings into it – that is the supreme achievement… Now I paint …
only the simplest things … Only in them are the symbolism, the pathos, and
the mystery of nature to be found.

He painted The Tower of the Blue Horses in the winter of 1913. He used the
colour blue to represent masculinity and spirituality, yellow for feminine joy and red

for an atmosphere of violence. He loved to paint animals, for they symbolized
innocence to him; he believed animals were purer in spirit than man. When he joined
the First World War, he found it utterly traumatic. He began to see ugliness in
animals, too: in a letter to his wife in 1915 he said that he was no longer able to see
the beauty which animals had once represented for him. He adhered to a bizarre

school of thought that believed war would purify the universe of all that was bad.
In 1916, he was killed by a shell splinter during the Battle of Verdun. The
government had recommended that he be taken out of the army, as he was such a

notable artist, but the orders for him to be reassigned did not make it in time.

One of his last letters read:

I understand well that you speak as easily of death as of something which
doesn’t frighten you. I feel precisely the same. In this war, you can try it out