Franz Marc Prints

About Franz Marc

Franz Marc was born in Munich in 1880, the son of a landscape painter, and at first meant to study theology before entering the Munich Academy in 1900. Visits to Paris in 1903 and 1907 brought him to Impressionism and Van Gogh, and in the years that followed he devoted himself to animals, studying their anatomy and movement in drawings, sculpture and paint. In 1910 he met August Macke and Wassily Kandinsky and moved to Sindelsdorf in Upper Bavaria, where he worked out a symbolic colour scheme, blue for the spiritual, yellow for the gentle, red for heavy matter, and painted the blue horses, yellow cows and red deer for which he is known. With Kandinsky he edited the Blue Rider almanac and organised its exhibitions of 1911 and 1912. A visit to Robert Delaunay in Paris in 1912 and the example of Futurism led him to break his animals into prismatic planes, and by 1914 he was painting fully abstract pictures such as Fighting Forms. He volunteered when war broke out and was killed by a shell near Verdun on 4 March 1916, at thirty-six. His animals, at one with the landscape and painted in pure colour, are among the warmest pictures of early modernism, bright enough for a child's room and serious enough for any other.