Franz Marc

The German artist, Franz Marc, was one of the founding members of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an important group of Expressionist artists active in the run-up to World War I. He was best known for his vividly coloured paintings of animals, with the blue horse a favourite subject.

Marc was born in Munich in 1880, inheriting an interest in art from his father Wilhelm, a landscape and genre painter. After shelving plans to become a priest, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in his home city. He soon grew dissatisfied with the naturalist style espoused there, however.

A pair of visits to Paris, in 1903 and 1907, proved crucial to his career progress, with Marc discovering the work of the Impressionists, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. His palette became highly saturated thereafter, and his colours invested with emotional and symbolic meaning. Marc now used yellow and blue, for example, to symbolise the feminine and the masculine respectively.

In 1911, he and Wassily Kandinsky co-founded The Blue Rider, a loose confederation of artists devoted to the expression of one’s inner state. That year, Marc also painted Yellow Cow, one of his most famous pictures, which today is found in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

His fondness for such depictions of animals in nature came from a pantheistic worldview. Marc believed that humans had lost their spirituality in the name of modernisation and industrialisation. By contrast, ‘animals, with their virginal sense of life, awakened all that was good in me,’ he said.

From late 1912 onwards, in response to the work of Robert Delaunay and the Italian Futurists, Marc adopted an increasingly dynamic, geometric approach to form. This is evident in paintings such as The Foxes (1913) and Fate of the Animals (1913). The former fetched £42,654,500 at Christie’s in 2022 — setting a record for the highest price ever paid for a work by Marc at auction. The latter, an apocalyptic scene of a forest fire (which today forms part of the Kunstmuseum Basel’s collection), is often spoken of as a premonition of World War I.

Marc joined the German army when conflict broke out. He died in action in 1916, aged 36.