Franz Marc

Franz Marc (1880–1916) painted animals with a spiritual intensity that set him apart from every other German Expressionist. Born in Munich to a landscape painter father, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts before two trips to Paris exposed him to Van Gogh and the Post-Impressionists. In 1911, he co-founded Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) with Wassily Kandinsky, a group that rejected naturalism in favor of color as pure emotion. Marc assigned symbolic meaning to his palette: blue represented masculinity and spirituality, yellow stood for feminine joy, red conveyed violence.

His subjects were almost exclusively animals, which he believed possessed a purity and innocence that modern humans had lost. Horses, deer, foxes, and tigers appear in bold, fragmented compositions influenced by Cubism and Futurism. Major works like The Tower of Blue Horses (1913), The Foxes (1913), and Fate of the Animals (1913) show his move toward abstraction. When World War I began, Marc enlisted in the German cavalry. The government later compiled a list of notable artists to withdraw from combat, but before the orders reached him, a shell splinter struck him in the head during the Battle of Verdun. He was thirty-six. The Nazis labeled his work "degenerate" in the 1930s, but most survived. In 2022, The Foxes sold for £42.6 million. Today his paintings hang in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.