A Painting on the Move: The Loan of “The Large Blue Horses”
By Laura Silver
May 8, 2026—Visit “Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910–1945” at Mia, on view through July 19, 2026, and you’ll see more than 70 works from Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie, 14 works from Mia’s own outstanding collection of 20th-century German art, and one very special guest star: Franz Marc’s The Large Blue Horses (1911).
It’s one of the most recognizable and beloved paintings in the collection of the Walker Art Center and is now on loan to Mia through the run of the exhibition. Its presence reflects both museums’ commitment to collaboration and a shared investment in scholarly and cultural alignment.
The Large Blue Horses was the first major modernist work acquired by the Walker and presumably shocked some visitors when it first went on display there in 1942. (At the time, the Walker was a staid, traditional art gallery in the grand home of lumber baron Thomas Barlow Walker). But today it’s a cornerstone of the Walker’s modernist collection and a perennial fan favorite—the vivid, graceful equines that launched a zillion dorm-room posters.
The Large Blue Horses with teacher and students at the top of the grand staircase, Walker Art Center, 1942. Courtesy Walker Art Center.
Tom Rassieur, John E. Andrus III Curator of Prints and Drawings and curator of Mia’s presentation of “Modern Art and Politics,” wanted to supplement the exhibition with pieces from Mia’s collection. He presented his picks—works by Wassily Kandinsky, Max Beckmann, and Käthe Kollwitz, among others—to Katie Luber, Mia’s Nivin and Duncan MacMillan Director and President.
He recalls what came next: “She approved my choices, and then she said, ‘How about The Large Blue Horses?’”
An Exhibition Takes Shape
The painting was not only an ideal fit for the exhibition, in fact it filled a gap. Franz Marc (1880–1916) and his artists’ group, The Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter), played a key role in the transition from German Expressionism to early abstraction. Rassieur says, “For Mia, it was very important that Marc be represented. How wonderful that we could do it with this painting.”
According to Joachim Jäger, the Neue Nationalgalerie’s deputy director, “There is no Franz Marc painting equal in quality and scale to the Walker’s Large Blue Horses in all of Germany.”
Franz Marc in 1910
Marc trained in academic art but was drawn to the intense colors and expressive forms he’d seen in the paintings of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. With Kandinsky, he founded The Blue Rider to show that color and form could express inner, spiritual truths without needing to represent the external world directly, an idea that anticipated abstract art.
Marc had a strong affinity for animals, which he saw as purer and more spiritual than humans, and he painted them in bright, symbolic colors (blue signified masculinity and spirituality). Over time, his work grew increasingly less naturalistic, edging toward abstraction even if he never fully arrived there before his death in World War I. He was killed at the Battle of Verdun in 1916.
In the 1930s, Nazis posthumously declared Marc a “degenerate artist” and removed his work from museums. In that tragic way, he’s in good company with many of the other artists in “Modern Art and Politics.”
A Crosstown Art Swap
Luber reached out to Mary Ceruti, the Walker’s executive director. Ceruti understood how important The Large Blue Horses would be in telling the story of 20th-century German art and agreed to the loan. In return, and to fill the empty space where The Large Blue Horses had been, Mia lent the Walker its Boy with Butterfly Net (1907), by Henri Matisse.
Gallery view of Mia’s Boy with Butterfly Net by Henri Matisse, at the Walker Art Center.
The two paintings didn’t have far to go (one-and-a-half miles across town, to be exact), but any artwork in motion, whether inside the museum or out, is an artwork at risk. Mia and Walker staff handled the move with their usual high level of precaution and attention.
“There isn’t too much difference between a short-distance loan and a long-distance loan, beyond the length of time the artwork—and the courier!—has to travel,” says Kara Furman, Mia’s Registrar for Exhibitions.
Like all artworks on loan, they traveled in custom-made crates designed to protect against vibrations, shocks, and variations in temperature and humidity. Depending on the route (which registrars never divulge) and the specific needs of the object, museums may call for additional security measures, like follow cars or GPS trackers.
Gallery view of the Walker’s The Large Blue Horses by Franz Marc, at Mia.
At Mia, The Large Blue Horses is now hanging alongside the colorful, abstracted paintings of Otto Möller, Georg Muche, Paul Klee, and Gabriele Münter, among others. Over the course of the early 1900s, these artists embraced the principle of abstraction as a new and universal language, in sync with a modern vision of society. Marc, Kandinsky, and their Blue Rider group led the way with vividly colored, dreamlike paintings. In its new context at Mia, The Large Blue Horses fulfills its role as both a local icon and a key work of early modern art.
Boy with Butterfly Net is now situated in the figurative section of “This Must Be the Place,” the Walker’s recent reinstallation of its permanent collection, between a painting by Marsden Hartley and one by Edward Hopper. Rassieur says it’s a perfect spot: “We hope that Mia’s Matisse fans will visit it at the Walker, in its new context, and that Walker fans who miss the Blue Horses will come to Mia and see it here, among its peers.”