Professor Butter Beard and Franz Marc’s “The Large Blue Horses”
“I am trying to heighten my sense of the organic rhythm of all things, trying to empathize pantheistically with the shivering and coagulating of blood in nature, in trees, in animals, in the air … I see no happier means to the animalization of art than the animal painting.”
—Franz Marc, “Über das Tier in der Kunst”
Nellie smiles all the time. And most usually when she is joyfully surprised. Like when she teases a young fox off guard in the fog, or loudly chats up a family of grazing deer pre-sunrise or recognizes one of her favorite humans emerging from their car and then bullets towards them with a Nellie version of a bear hug. A pure sense of life and the joys that can be found within.
Animals, Franz Marc felt, were in many ways superior to humans - more honest in their expression of their inner truths, in more direct contact with the inner truths of nature. He wrote, “People with their lack of piety, especially men, never touched my true feelings. But animals with their virginal sense of life awakened all that is good in me.”
Franz Moritz Wilhelm Marc , born in Munich, Germany in 1880, was a German print maker and artist. He not only had a profound influence on art during his time but was also considered to be one of the key figures of the early twentieth-century Expressionist movement in Germany. Ever searching for the purest essence of the soul, Marc’s form of primitivism went further than that of his fellow Expressionists. While they looked to the lives of peasants and so-called primitive cultures for inspiration, Marc looked all the way back to a state of nature before humankind even existed.
Within his art, Marc created a kind of synesthetic color wheel of tones, assigning somber sounds to blue, joyful sounds to yellow, and a brutality of discord to red. He went on to ascribe not only emotional but spiritual attributes to the primary colors, writing to his friend August Macke: “Blue is the male principle, severe and spiritual. Yellow is the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy, the color that has to come into conflict with, and succumb to the other two. For instance, if you mix blue — so serious, so spiritual — with red, you intensify the red to the point of unbearable sadness, and the comfort of yellow, the color complementary to violet, becomes indispensable …”
“The Large Blue Horses” is my absolute favorite of Marc’s “animalization of art.” It is not simply a naturalistic painting of wild animals in an unspoiled landscape. The intensely saturated blue beasts graze in a vibrant pasture of greens and yellows underneath rainbow skies, completely at ease with themselves and each other. While the proportions, anatomy, and postures of the animals are accurate (he made a living teaching animal anatomy for a time), Marc has increasingly abstracted their forms toward basic, almost curving shapes that echo into the distant landscape. Your mind fully accepts that these gorgeous beings are naturally as blue as a blueberry, wholly experiencing the ordinary peace of their surreal environment.
Within a year of painting them, Marc was dead — a shell explosion in the first days of World War I’s longest battle sent a metal splinter into his skull, killing him instantly, ironically while a German government official was compiling a list of prominent artists to be recalled from military service as national treasures, with Marc’s name on it.
The poet Mary Oliver, in her poem “Blue Horses,” projects herself into Marc’s painting, running her hand softly over one animal’s blue mane, letting another’s nose touch her gently, as she reflects on Marc’s tragic, tremendous life that managed to make such timeless portals into beauty and tenderness in the midst of unspeakable brutality:
“I do not know how to thank you, Franz Marc.
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.”
The blue horses inspired this latest creation in my personal attempt to “make something beautiful.” I mimicked the beast’s delicious curves by swirling blueberry jam into a white chocolate and fresh basil cheesecake filling that floats over a pasture of fresh blueberries, all corralled peacefully in place within a hazelnut shortbread crust. And while it cools, I think I’ll take Nellie out for another chance to share a giggle with all her surprised buddies.
Blueberry, Basil and White Chocolate Cheesecake Tart
Tart Shell:
1 cup all-purpose flour
4 Tbsp hazelnut flour
2 Tbsp granulated sugar
½ tsp fine sea salt
6 Tbsp unsalted butter, well chilled and cut into small cubes
1 large egg, cold
2 Tbsp ice-cold water
Filling:
2 ½ ounces white chocolate, melted and slightly cooled
8 ounces cream cheese, room temperature
½ cup plain Greek yoghurt
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/4 tsp fine sea salt
1 tsp vanilla paste
1 large egg, room temperature
¼ cup fresh basil leaves
Fresh (or frozen) whole blueberries – enough to make a single layer in the bottom of your tart shell
6 tsp of your best blueberry jam
1) In a food processor, pulse together the two flours, sugar and salt to combine. Add the cold butter and pulse a few times to evenly distribute. Add the egg and the 2 Tbsp cold water and run the machine until the dough comes together. Remove from the processor, wrap in plastic wrap and chill the dough for one hour.
2) Roll the dough into a 1/8” round and carefully place it into a tart pan with a removable bottom, leaving 1” overhang. Prick the bottom of the tart shell with a fork and chill in the refrigerator while you heat the oven to 400 degrees. Blind bake the shell for twenty minutes until the bottom of the shell just starts to brown. Remove from the oven and lower the oven temperature to 325 degrees. Trim the edges of the shell and let it cool slightly while you make the filling.
3) Melt the white chocolate (either over a double boiler or in the microwave using 20 second zaps). In the food processor, combine the cream cheese, yoghurt, sugar, salt and vanilla paste and process until the mixture is smooth. Add the egg and process to fully combine. Add the white chocolate and process to fully combine. Pour the cheesecake batter into a medium bowl. Julienne the basil leaves and fold into the cheesecake batter.
4) Make a single layer of fresh or frozen blueberries in the bottom of the tart shell. Pour the basil/cheesecake batter over the berries and smooth the top. Dollop the six teaspoons of your blueberry jam over the batter and use a knife or wooden skewer to create swirls of the jam in the batter.
5) Bake the tart for 25-30 minutes until the filling is set with a slight jiggle in the center. Turn the oven off and leave the tart in the oven for an additional 30 minutes. Cool the tart on a wire rack and then refrigerate before serving.
