chapter 11 Maria Marc’s Letters Kimberly A. Smith Abstract Maria Marc began her relationship with Franz Marc as an artist but, after a few years, her role had shifted from ambitious young painter to helpmate and nurturing wife. Franz left much of the regular work of writing to Maria; the postcards and letters penned by her hand gave rise to a collaborative network of artists, theorists, and poets. Indeed, Maria’s hand is quietly present in many of the texts that buttress Franz Marc’s art, both during and after his lifetime. This essay argues that the assemblage of texts by Maria Marc—letters, postcards, widow’s signatures, provenance notes, etc.—should be seen as productive. They form the literary tissue against and within which Franz Marc’s art emerged, and are thus a generative act in their own right. Maria Marc hovers like a ghost at the edges of Franz Marc’s œuvre. Married to one of the leading artists of the Expressionist generation, her role in the movement continues to be obscure. She is the ever-present cipher in the he- roic Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) narrative, the kind face looking obliquely out from photographs of Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, artists who have long been canonized in the history of German modernism (fig. 11.1). Maria Marc too was a practicing artist, yet few people think of her as more than Franz Marc’s unobtrusive companion, if they think of her at all. This essay was written in the context of a conference on women artists active in central European and Rus- sian modernist circles, and certainly Maria Marc is precisely the type of figure who makes such conferences necessary.1 How can we tell the full history of art if we do not reckon with its women artists and what they too produced? Yet I want to suggest that to properly see Maria Marc’s contribution to the history of German modernism, we need to expand and somewhat complicate our defini- tion of “production.” To that end, I focus here on Maria’s letters—a title that only fully works in English, as it suggests both the “letters” (Briefe) that Maria composed, but also the many “letters” (Buchstaben) that made up her various 1 I thank the conference organizers, Isabel Wünsche and Tanja Malycheva, and the other participants for their helpful feedback and comments on this research. © kimberly a. smith, ���7 | doi �0.��63/9789004333�47_0�3 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC License. Kimberly A. Smith - 9789004333147 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 11:31:15AM via free access <UN> Maria Marc’s Letters 155 Figure 11.1 Members of the Blue Rider group on the balcony of Kandinsky’s apartment at Ainmillerstraße 36, Munich, left to right: Maria Marc, Franz Marc, Bernhard Koehler Sr., Heinrich Campendonk, Thomas von Hartmann, Wassily Kandinsky (seated), 1911 photograph: gabriele münter. gabriele münter and johannes eichner foundation, inv. nr. 2205, © 2015 artists rights society (ars), new york / vg bild-kunst, bonn forms of writing. And by doing so, I hope that we may see Maria Marc as more instrumental to the history of Expressionism than is typically acknowledged. Before she met and married Franz, Maria Marc was Maria Franck, eldest daughter of a well-to-do Berlin family. In keeping with the cultural norms of the day, Franck received the kind of light education thought proper for a middle-class woman. She soon became interested in more serious artistic training, however, and enrolled in a private art academy for women when she was 19 years old. Eight years later, at the age of 27, she moved to Munich and Kimberly A. Smith - 9789004333147 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 11:31:15AM via free access <UN> 156 Smith studied under Max Feldbauer at the only school open to women artists, the ladies’ academy of the Künstlerinnen-Verein (Women Artists’ Association). She met Franz Marc in 1904, but it was not until 1906 that they began their courtship. Marc was seeing two other women at that time, one of whom ( Maria Schnür) he married and then divorced after several months, and Marc and Franck would not settle into their committed relationship for some time. In 1908, the pair traveled to the countryside outside of Munich to live and work together, where Franck produced a series of quixotic illustrations for a pro- posed children’s book. These are marvelous images, playful and peculiar, and at times richly kaleidoscopic; but Franck’s artistic goals were thwarted by a series of challenges. She had hoped that Insel Verlag would pick up the chil- dren’s book, but the publisher ultimately declined the project. In addition, Franck struggled with rheumatoid arthritis in her hands. And finally, for sev- eral long months in 1910 and 1911, she was forbidden by her parents to stay with Marc in Sindelsdorf because the couple had not yet gained a dispensation to get married after his first marriage. The strictures put on unmarried women of this era meant that Franck had little choice but to return to her parents’ home in Berlin, at precisely the time in which Marc began to build connections with the avant-garde circles in Munich that would become so important for his professional growth.2 He traveled to Munich alone where he encountered Kandinsky for the first time, inaugurating the friendship that later led to the Blaue Reiter exhibitions and the Blaue Reiter almanac. Franck finally was able to leave Berlin, and she made the almost unthinkable decision—considering the bourgeois conventions of the era—to live with Franz Marc in Sindelsdorf as a couple, years before they were officially married. They referred to each other as husband and wife, but were not officially married until 1911 in London, which was acknowledged only by English law, and then finally under German law in 1913.3 In these first years, Franz and Maria together engaged with progressive art and made connections with like-minded artists.4 They debated the com- plexities of aesthetic issues, which both assumed were worth serious time and contemplation, and as partners were willing to breach conservative social and artistic boundaries in the service of great art. In this shared belief in 2 On this topic, see Brigitte Salmen, “Maria Marc—Leben und Lebenswerk,” in Maria Marc im Kreis des “Blauen Reiter”, exh. cat., ed. Brigitte Salmen (Murnau: Schloßmuseum Murnau, 2004), 11. 3 Susanna Partsch, Franz Marc: 1880–1916 (Cologne: Taschen, 2001), 16. 4 From this point on, since they then shared the last name of Marc, I will often refer to both artists by their first names to differentiate them. Kimberly A. Smith - 9789004333147 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 11:31:15AM via free access <UN> Maria Marc’s Letters 157 art’s significance, Maria never wavered. Even after Franz’s death in 1916, she expressed her gratitude for having “something for whose sake one loves life and through which one can experience everything that gives life value: that is art.”5 On the other hand, Maria’s relationship to this art seems to have be- gun shifting around this period. She spent less and less time on her own work, due certainly to her continuing struggles with the arthritis in her hand, but also as her confidence in her own artistic talents waned. Maria and Franz had begun as artistic compatriots, and though their marriage was strong and they remained vitally devoted to each other, the balance of their relationship slowly but surely altered on its axis. Franz was ever more committed to the necessity of making his art, and received increasing public attention for this endeav- or, while Maria’s position gravitated to one of supportive partner rather than autonomous producer. To be clear, she did not completely stop creating her own work, but the emphasis of their shared artistic identity shifted squarely to Franz’s contributions to the modernist developments of the Blaue Reiter. Moreover, in spite of their progressive attitudes towards both personal and artistic conventions, and their joint faith in the profundity of the aesthetic experience, certain traditional gender roles seem to have fallen readily into place in their married life. Thus, even if we know that she began her relation- ship with Franz as an artist, and never completely gave that work up, it also seems clear that after a few years, Maria’s role had shifted from artist to help- mate, from ambitious young painter to nurturing wife of one of the century’s preeminent modernists.6 Indeed, recounting the meetings held at Gabriele Münter and Kandinsky’s house in Murnau where the ideas for the almanac Der Blaue Reiter were first worked out, art historian Gisela Klein has asserted that Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke and Maria Marc “were not artists, but artistic companions, at best the echo and mouthpiece of their husbands, Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke with charm and modesty, Maria Marc with the resonant (volltönenden) claim to include her with her husband as a ‘We.’”7 5 “etwas zu haben, um dessentwillen man das Leben liebt und durch das man alles erfahren kann, was dem Leben Wert verleiht:—das ist Kunst.” Maria Marc, Letter to Gabriele Münt- er, #230 (July 15, 1916), in Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Briefwechsel: Mit Briefen von und an Gabriele Münter und Maria Marc, ed. Klaus Lankheit (Munich and Zurich: R. Piper & Co. Verlag, 1983), 282. 6 See Bibiana K. Obler, Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky & Münter, Arp & Taeuber (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014), 70. 7 Gisela Klein, Gabriele Münter und Wassily Kandinsky: Biographie eines Paares (Frankfurt, 1990), 390, 393; cited in Annegret Hoberg, Maria Marc: Leben und Werk, 1876–1955, exh.