Marc, Franz

Timeline: Towards Abstraction

Franz Marc was born on February 8, 1880, in Munich, Germany. He studied at the Munich Art Academy and traveled to Paris several times where he saw the work of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the Impressionists. With Kandinsky, he founded the almanac "Der Blaue Reiter" in 1911 and organized exhibitions with this name. He was a principal member of the First German Salon d'Automne in 1913. At the beginning of World War I, he volunteered for military service and he died near Verdun, France, on March 4, 1916.

Franz Marc was a pioneer in the birth of abstract art at the beginning of the twentieth-century The Blaue Reiter group put forth a new program for art based on exuberant color and on profoundly felt emotional and spiritual states. It was Marc's particular contribution to introduce paradisiacal imagery that had as its dramatis personae a collection of animals, most notably a group of heroic horses.

Tragically, Marc was killed in World War I at the age of thirty-six, but not before he had created some of the most exciting and touching paintings of the Expressionist movement.

Dog Lying in the Snow
1910-11 (160 Kb); Oil on canvas, 62.5 x 105 cm; Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt

The Yellow Cow
1911 (100 Kb); Oil on canvas, 140.5 x 189.2 cm; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Deer in the Woods II
1912 (170 Kb); Oil on canvas, 110.5 x 80.5 cm; Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich

Tiger
1912 (140 Kb); Oil on canvas, 111 x 111.5 cm; Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich

The fate of the animals
1913 (130 Kb); Oil on canvas, 196 x 266 cm; Kunstmuseum, Basle

Foxes
1913 (140 Kb); Oil on canvas, 87 x 65 cm; Kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf

The Lamb
1913-14; Museum Boymans-van-Beuningen, Rotterdam

Fighting Forms
1914 (150 Kb); Oil on canvas, 91 x 131 cm; Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich

Photographs by Mark Harden.