Franz Marc
The painter of blue horses.
Franz Marc founded Der Blaue Reiter with Kandinsky and painted animals in symbolic colours. He was killed at Verdun in 1916.
Franz Marc was born in 1880 in Munich. His father was a landscape painter. He first intended to study theology and then philosophy, but chose art and studied at the academy in Munich. Trips to Paris in 1903 and 1907 brought him into contact with Impressionism and van Gogh.
Animals early became his great subject. He believed that animals lived in a purer harmony with nature than humans. He studied their anatomy closely but wanted to depict how they experienced the world, not just how they looked.
His friendship with the artist August Macke from 1910 was important. In a letter to him Marc formulated his own theory of colour, in which blue stood for the spiritual and masculine, yellow for the gentle and feminine and red for matter. That is why he painted blue horses and yellow cows. Blue Horse I of 1911 is in the Lenbachhaus in Munich and Yellow Cow of the same year in the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In 1911 he founded Der Blaue Reiter together with Kandinsky, and the following year they published the almanac of the same name. Under the influence of Cubism and Futurism his forms broke up into crystalline, transparent planes. The Fate of the Animals of 1913, a dark vision of destruction, is in the Kunstmuseum Basel. The Tower of Blue Horses disappeared at the end of the Second World War and has never been found.
When the First World War broke out Marc enlisted. He was killed at Verdun in March 1916, aged 36. During the war he managed to fill a sketchbook with drawings. He is regarded as one of the foremost artists of Expressionism, and his blue horses are among the best-known images of modern art.