Erhard Kracht collection

This collection is dedicated to the important expressionist painter Franz Marc (1880–1916). With 43 works of exquisite quality, including three paintings, one bronze sculpture, numerous pen-and-ink drawings, and woodcuts, it covers every stage in the artist’s development, from his beginnings and his animal studies to his mature works and abstract compositions. There is no comparable private collection of this artist’s work on this level. Since 2004, it has been on permanent loan to Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale).

Erhard Kracht (1937–1997) amassed his exquisite collection of Marc’s works with great passion and growing expertise in just under a decade. With advice by the art historian Klaus Lankheit, who managed the artist’s estate for Maria Marc after the Second World War, he was able to add some rare discoveries to his collection. In 2006, the entire collection was presented at the exhibition “Franz Marc. The magic of creation” at Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale) and published in a catalogue.

This long-term loan is a great stroke of luck for the museum. Until the Nazi seizure of works under the “Degenerate Art” campaign, Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale) had the largest inventory of Franz Marc’s most high-quality works in Germany, including Tierschicksale (Fate of the Animals, 1913, today in Kunstmuseum Basel) and Hirsche im Walde (Deer in the Forest, 1911, still missing). Alongside Marc’s painting of Weiße Katze (the White Cat, 1912), his wonderful animal sculptures and a number of works on paper which escaped the confiscations in 1937, the Kracht Collection enables the museum to do justice to Franz Marc's work once again and present it in a suitably impressive manner.