Antelope

The small watercolour painted on a postcard, dedicated by Franz Marc to the poet Eise Lasker-Schüler, was created in the same year as his major works, The Tower of the Blue Horses and The Fate of the Animals. It shares the crystalline structure that characterizes those works, although without evoking the same degree of pathos. The animal’s form is neither notable for its conspicuously monumental scale, nor charged with dramatic tension by the extensive segmentation of the subjects’ surroundings. The antelope is shown in a moment of calm and safe arrival. The jagged edges of the rocks are echoed, with subtle changes, in the line of the antelope’s chest and belly. The dark blue sky and the black rocks in the foreground herald the approaching night. Understood in the light of the text written on the reverse of the postcard, it becomes clear that the picture serves a death announcement in the guise of an animal, a tender expression of farewell. (‘Mrs/ Eise Lasker-/Schüler/Berlin Grunewald/13, Humboldtstr 13/11’ >... Jussuff, our good father has left us, tomorrow we bury him. It is all so sad. We would like to visit you on Monday afternoon, I trust this is convenient? Yours Franz and M. W. 2. Behind the Catholic church.<).