The Tower of Blue Horses

Looking at The Tower of Blue Horses

Four blue horses rise together in Franz Marc’s The Tower of Blue Horses. Their bodies overlap in a tall, crowded column. Heads turn towards the left, while blue and white curves give the animals weight and movement. A yellow field and a high arc of warm colour open behind them. The painting was made around 1913 and became one of Marc’s best-known works. Yet no visitor can stand before it today: the large oil canvas disappeared in the aftermath of the Second World War. Its image survives in reproductions and related studies, while its whereabouts remain unknown. ^{[1] [2]}

The German title is Der Turm der blauen Pferde. Bildarchiv Foto Marburg records an oil painting on canvas of 200 × 130 cm, formerly in Berlin’s Nationalgalerie as A II 308. Its catalogue dates the work 1913/14; Berlin State Museums commonly call it a 1913 painting. Those closely related dates should be kept visible rather than treated as two different towers. What is secure is the distinct physical object: a monumental, vertical oil painting once held by the Nationalgalerie, not the smaller surviving postcard design that also bears the tower title. ^{[2] [1] [3]}

A tower made of bodies

In the reproduced composition, the nearest horse occupies much of the lower and right-hand picture. Its curved body turns towards the viewer, while a pale head angles left. Other heads and chests rise behind and above it. The horses do not stand in a tidy row. They form a stack whose overlapping bodies make the number of animals briefly uncertain. Looking upward, the viewer moves from the weight of the foreground animal through repeated necks and faces into the bright upper part of the image. The title “tower” describes that upward rhythm as much as a literal arrangement. ^{[2] [4]}

Marc’s blue is varied, not a single coat colour. Pale white-blue planes catch the light along heads and bodies; deeper blues describe turns and spaces between them. The animal forms are joined by curves and angular divisions that make the surface feel rhythmic. The warmer yellow and orange above and to the left set off the cool column. The painting’s enormous scale would have made this encounter bodily: two metres tall and narrower than a landscape, it placed a wall of horses directly before a viewer. Reproductions preserve the general design but cannot reproduce that physical presence or confirm every nuance of the original paint. ^{[2] [1]}

The image also belongs to Marc’s sustained use of horses as more than observed rural subjects. Earlier Blue Horse I centres on one inward-turned animal. The Large Blue Horses spreads three bodies across a broad canvas. The tower gathers four horses vertically, making repetition itself the subject’s force. The comparisons help identify which famous “blue horses” are being discussed. Similar colour and titles do not make the works interchangeable. ^{[5] [6] [2]}

Watch: Franz Marc

Explore Marc’s blue horses, the Blue Rider circle and the move towards abstraction in English-language videos.

Franz Marc, Blue Horses and Der Blaue Reiter

The Canvas

An English-language introduction to Marc’s blue horses, animals, spirituality and the Blue Rider.

Watch on YouTube

▶01 · Marc and his horsesFranz Marc, Blue Horses and Der Blaue ReiterThe Canvas▶02 · The Blue RiderWho were the Blue Rider?Tate▶03 · Towards abstractionThe Case for AbstractionThe Art Assignment · PBS Digital Studios

The postcard and the missing canvas

A small, coloured design for the tower survives on a postcard Marc sent to the poet Else Lasker-Schüler at New Year 1913. The Bavarian State Painting Collections describe it as the only surviving coloured design for the legendary painting. It is important evidence for the development of the image and for Marc’s artistic exchange with Lasker-Schüler. It is also a separate artwork, made on a different support and scale. A reproduction of that postcard must not be labelled as though it were a photograph of the finished Nationalgalerie oil painting. ^[3]

The distinction matters especially because the full painting is missing. A preparatory image can show how Marc was planning or testing an arrangement, but it cannot settle exactly how every painted passage of the final canvas looked. Historical photographs and printed reproductions provide further evidence, again with the limits of their own reproduction processes. When we read the picture now, we work from a record of the painting, not from direct inspection of its surface. That is a limitation worth making plain; it need not prevent careful looking at the known composition. ^{[2] [3]}

Marc’s association with Lasker-Schüler extended beyond this one card. The Pinakothek displayed the tower design with twenty-one other painted postcards from the Sofie and Emanuel Fohn gift. These intimate exchanges are a different kind of object from a painting intended to dominate a public gallery wall. Together they show how an idea could move between private communication and a monumental canvas. The painted card was not a miniature version made after the loss; it belonged to the work’s early history. ^[3]

A Berlin landmark

In 1919 the Nationalgalerie acquired the tower from Marc’s widow, Maria Marc. Berlin State Museums record that it became a central work in the museum’s modern department at the Kronprinzenpalais and was displayed there until that department closed in 1936. Maria’s role in the transfer is part of the painting’s posthumous history: she was a practising artist and a steward of Marc’s work after his death in 1916. The tower was a public museum painting for nearly two decades before it disappeared. ^{[1] [7]}

The Nazi campaign against modern art broke that public life. The painting was confiscated in 1937 under the regime’s “degenerate art” campaign and briefly included in the Munich propaganda exhibition of that name. Berlin State Museums say it was removed after a protest by the German Officers’ Association, which pointed to Marc’s wartime service and death. That intervention did not restore the work to the museum. By 1938 it was under Hermann Göring’s control according to the museum’s account. The sequence shows how inconsistent the regime’s treatment could be, but its confiscation of the painting is unambiguous. ^[1]

The Nationalgalerie’s former inventory number and the confiscation are also recorded by Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, which preserves a pre-war photographic record. The archive dates the work 1913/14 and describes its status as confiscated and missing. Such records are more reliable guides to the object than web pages that present it as if it could still be visited in a Berlin gallery. Its former collection is known; its current physical location is not. ^[2]

What happened after 1945?

The painting’s fate after the Second World War has not been established. Berlin State Museums call it missing since 1945 and note reported sightings in Berlin after the war. Reports of a sighting are not proof that a later owner or store of the painting has been identified. The museum has also said that speculation about a Swiss bank safe could not be confirmed. A responsible account cannot end this story with a confident claim that the tower was destroyed, secretly saved, or found. The documented position is loss with unresolved whereabouts. ^{[1] [8] [9]}

The uncertainty is not an invitation to make the disappearance more mysterious than the evidence allows. The painting is known from its pre-war public display, archival records and reproductions. It was taken from a public collection, passed through the Nazi seizure system, and cannot now be located. The loss is both an interruption to Marc’s surviving work and a loss to viewers who cannot check the image against the painted object. That is enough to explain why the tower continues to matter without building a story out of rumours. ^{[2] [1]}

Looking through what survives

The tower’s surviving image still communicates a striking artistic decision. Marc made four horses into a single upward structure, set cool blue bodies against a warm field, and let repetition give each head more force. We can follow the stacked forms and compare them with the postcard design and with other horse paintings. We should also remember that reproduction can flatten size, texture and exact colour. The missing canvas asks for two kinds of attention at once: to the composition Marc made and to the historical record that explains why we encounter it at a distance. ^{[2] [3]}