franz marc // biography (1880-1916) / gallery / prints

Franz Marc
Katzen Detail, 1908
Manipulated Image

//Biog.//
FRANZ MARC

Known as: German Expressionist Painter

Date of birth: February 8, 1880 (Munich, Germany)

Date of death: March 4, 1916 (Battle of Verdun)

Franz Marc was associated with August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky in the Blaue Reiter. His chief subjects were animals: blue horses, yellow tigers, red fawns. What was it that led him to concentrate on painting animals? Marc himself explained his choice of subject matter in these words: "From an early date I felt humankind to be 'ugly'; animals seemed to me possessed of a greater beauty and purity..."

He was deeply dissatisfied with the impurity of the world, and was questing for a universal art which would resolve the contrarieties of life in the harmony of creation.

Using pure colours highly charged with symbolic values, adopting crystalline shapes, and absorbing the influence of Cubism, he moved steadily towards an abstract order of image, coming closer to his own understanding of a better world. Indeed, he met Delaunay in Paris in 1912 and his last works (1914) are more abstract.

He was killed in the Battle of Verdun.

There is a good collection of his work in Munich (Stadtische Gall); others are in Leicester, Minneapolis, New York (Guggenheim) and several German galleries.

Trivia:

In 1900, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.
In the early 1900s he became heavily influenced by the work of Vincent van Gogh.
He was in Paris in 1903 and 1907.
He was killed by a grenade explosion while riding a horse on patrol in the Battle of Verdun.