Tiger

1912

Animals played a central role in the art of Franz Marc, who attempted to capture their spiritual purity through bold, stylized forms like those of the tiger depicted in this woodcut. A close associate of Vasily Kandinsky’s, he cultivated a dynamic Expressionist style that used rhythmic patterns of color and line to evoke movement. In a short text he wrote in 1910, Marc stated that he was trying to “achieve a pantheistic empathy with the throbbing and racing of the blood in nature, in trees, in animals, in the air.” Marc died four years after making this print, in World War I.