The Recently Restituted Franz Marc's The Foxes Breaks the Artist's Record at Christie's

Hosted by Christie’s, the historic 20th/21st Century: Shanghai to London made remarkable results, topping £249 million. Among the star lots was Franc Marc’s The Foxes, which sold for a record of £42,6 million, more than triple the previous auction record for the artist.

This masterpiece featuring two foxes fusing in kaleidoscopic cubist composition marks a seminal period in the artist’s career amid the formation of Der Blaue Reiter in 1911. During those years, Marc’s palette transformed; the colors became more vigorous and backgrounds more fragmented. The artist depicted the animals as morphing into form and color.

In 2021, the city of Dusseldorf returned The Foxes to the heirs of the Jewish banker and businessman Kurt Grawi and his wife Else, who sold it during WW II to escape the Holocaust. The restitution, which set new precedent for art sold under Nazi duress, has certainly contributed to the renowned interest in the piece.

The Formation of Franz Marc

Franz Marc was one of the leading German artists in the early 20th century who had a seminal role in the development of Expressionism. He was one of the initiators of Der Blaue Reiter or The Blue Rider journal and is best known for the paintings featuring animals, such as the case with The Foxes. After the outbreak of WW I, Marc was recruited in the German Army, and two years later, he died at the Battle of Verdun. During his short-lived career, Marc made around sixty prints in woodcut and lithography and numerous drawings and paintings. His style is characterized by bright colors, reduction of forms and emotional charge.

After the Nazis took power in 1933, they started censoring modern art under the premises of Degenerate art, the one that defied the Arian principles or morality. Between 1936 and 1937, 130 of Marc’s works were removed from German museums.

A few years before this awful sociopolitical shift took place, the above-mentioned Kurt Grawi bought The Foxes. By 1935, his businesses and properties were dissolved or Aryanized, and three years later, Grawi was imprisoned at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for several weeks. In 1939, he managed to escape Germany to Chile via Belgium, and that is when he smuggled The Foxes, intending to sell it in New York and further fund his escape.

Grawe’s intermediary reached MoMA and offered the painting by underlining that “the owner of this painting is a German refugee who is trying to obtain some cash which he is in dire need.” The museum was willing to pay a lousy sum compared to the price Grawi originally paid for the work. Ultimately, The Foxes was sold to the German-American actor couple William Dieterle and Charlotte Hagenbruch in 1940. Twenty years later, the German entrepreneur Helmut Horten acquired the painting and bequeathed it to Dusseldorf’s art collection.

Guided By The Spiritual

Marc often painted animals as symbols of his pantheistic worldview. The artist was tempted by the spiritual from a young age and was most likely influenced by his mother’s Calvinist beliefs. When he was 17, Marc wanted to study theology. However, art was his choice.

The interest in spirituality apparently remained active and was redirected to art production. Marc shared the same interests with Kandinsky. The two men believed in the spiritual nature of color, and so the The Blue Rider was guided by this mystical persuasion.

The fin de siècle and the first decade of the 20th century were marked by the growing interest in mysticism informed mainly by the teachings of Madame Blavatsky, who founded theosophy. Modern artists were attracted to this doctrine and explored the elemental forces of nature through their art, believing that only souls communicate through colored auras behind the material world. Franc Marc wrote in 1912:

Art has always been and is in its very essence the boldest departure from nature. It is the bridge into the spirit world.

Through their art and The Blue Rider, Marc and Kandinsky wanted to reexamine the boundaries between the arts and science and establish a new, expressionistic art based on color, gesture, and sound. They were very much inspired by the groundbreaking composer Arnold Schoenberg, who pioneered atonality, an entirely new approach to music-making. Marc was also fond of the Futurists, whose controversial practice sparked the European avant-garde. The atmosphere of rejection and visionary rhetoric is best illustrated with the announcement of The Blue Rider artists:

We are standing at the threshold of one of the greatest epochs that mankind has ever experienced, the epoch of great spirituality.

The Restitution and Sale of Franz Marc’s The Foxes

The Foxes became part of the city’s art collection in 1962 and, ever since, the painting had a special place at the Dusseldorf Kunstpalast, up until it became the subject of six years-long dispute over custody. As mentioned, the painting was sold in New York to fund Grawi’s flight from Nazi Germany. Therefore, the final decision concerning the restitution is seen as unprecedented in terms of future claims of cultural heritage sold during the conflict within Europe.

Alongside its turbulent history, the outstanding work is a milestone in Marc’s career following the formation of Der Blaue Reiter in 1911. The head of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s in London, Keith Gill, briefly commented:

The year 1913 is a key one for Marc: he is experimenting with a new dynamic visual language, inspired by Orphism and Futurism, which would become his leaping-off point into abstraction.

During the auction, The Foxes was estimated between €15 million and €30 million. The painting was sold to a phone bidder in London, surpassing its estimate.