Nude Lying in the Flowers by Franz Marc

Franz Marc's Nude Lying in the Flowers painting is now part of a private collection

Although his focus was almost exclusively drawn to the painting of animals, he did paint several works that depict nude women in nature. These were primarily painted in tones of red and yellow. The forms in nature echo the curves of the woman in this painting. It is also a direct example of the painting, Red Woman. Tribal woman were seen as a source of renewal and rebirth.

Marc painted a number of nudes of women either bathing or relaxing in nature. These figures blend amazingly well with their landscape and could easily be seen as a part of nature. Among others, these include Nude with cat, Red Woman, Nudes in Vermilion, Bathing Women, and Nude Lying in the Flowers.

Although Marc had a brief career, he made a lasting impact on expressionism and abstraction with his symbolic use of colour and expressive linear forms. Some of Marcs descendants could be Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Marc's ability to generate a sense of emotion with the primitive and spiritual and his use of bright colours, inspired them.

Earlier on, Marc had been influenced by the emotional symbolism of colour that Van Gogh and A Macke used in his paintings. Many features that remained identifiable of the natural world are evident in his pictures. Marc used colours to humanize natural forms of the landscape, thereby emphasizing his own interest in pantheism.

Marc saw yellow as evoking feminine emotions and blue as a representation of masculinity. By combining these two colours he indicated the merging of feminine and masculine. This was done in reference to his marriage to Franck. The animals are connected to their background in his paintings, by the repetition of colour.