by Karin Bergs
The Lehnbachhaus has fixed and changing exhibitions. On the first floor you can find Joseph Beuys, on the second floor the ‘Blue Rider’, consisting of Marc, Macke, Kandinsky and, surprisingly, even women, such as Maria Marc, Franz Marc’s wife. Of course Gabriele Münter is also there, who donated some of her pictures to the city of Munich in 1957, and Marianne von Werefkin. I always find it a great experience to look at Franz Marc’s ‘blue horses’. These horses were the namesake of the ‘Blue Rider’, the Munich Expressionists.
Yes, the color blue really has something special in art! Blue used to be an expensive color that was difficult to produce. There was a profession called blue dyers, who only dyed fabrics blue. This is where the names ‘make blue’ come from, because the dyeing process took a long time, and ‘the blue miracle’, because the result was often a surprise. Leonardo da Vinci invented the ‘sfumato’ to depict landscapes in a foggy haze by coloring the landscapes bluish.
The color blue certainly always had a special meaning. But I knew the youngest son of Hendrik Moor, a Fürstenfeldbruck painter from the Blue Rider era, who also used a lot of blue in his works. My son once told me in passing: ‘The color blue in art is overrated!’ He further said that his father never had any money, he had to feed 7 children and he always had to save on materials. He bought his paints from a paint factory in Grafrath. He once got a whole batch of blue there cheaply. From this point on, blue was the dominant color in his pictures. Was Franz Marc possibly feeling the same way?
However, the color blue can take us into a beautiful dream world because shades of blue are calming.
