- Died:
- March 4, 1916, near Verdun, France (aged 36)
- Movement / Style:
- Der Blaue Reiter
- Neue Künstlervereinigung
Franz Marc
Franz Marc (born February 8, 1880, Munich, Germany—died March 4, 1916, near Verdun, France) was a German painter and printmaker as well as a leading figure of German Expressionism. He is perhaps best known for his vividly colored paintings of animals that use simplified, increasingly abstract forms and symbolic color to express ideas of spiritual purity and harmony with nature. In 1911 he and Wassily Kandinsky founded Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”), an influential association of avant-garde artists who sought to create spiritually expressive art as a means of opposing the materialism of modern society.
Early art
Marc’s early works were painted in a naturalistic academic style, but after discovering French Impressionist painting in 1903 he adopted a more modern approach, using simplified lines and vivid colors. During a trip to Paris in 1907 he encountered the work of the Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, whose vigorous, emotional brushwork profoundly influenced his style, notably in Cats on a Red Cloth (1909–10).
Joining the Neue Künstlervereinigung
In 1910 Marc met the Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky, who was a member of a group of Expressionist artists known as the Neue Künstlervereinigung (“New Artists’ Association”). Marc joined the group in 1911 and worked closely with another member, the young painter August Macke, whose use of broad areas of less-naturalistic colors led Marc to experiment with similar techniques.
Der Blaue Reiter
Marc and Kandinsky split from the Neue Künstlervereinigung in 1911, forming a rival group of artists named Der Blaue Reiter. Together they edited an almanac of the same name, which was published in 1912. Having long been interested in Eastern philosophies and religions, Marc responded enthusiastically to Kandinsky’s notion that art should lay bare the spiritual essence of natural forms instead of copying their objective appearance. Kandinsky and Marc developed the idea that mystical energy is best revealed through abstraction. Marc believed that civilization destroys human awareness of the spiritual force of nature; consequently, he usually painted animals, and he was also passionately interested in the art of pre-industrial societies, children, and those with mental health conditions.
Marc’s philosophy can be seen in works such as Blue Horses (1911), in which the powerfully simplified and rounded outlines of the horses are echoed in the rhythms of the landscape background, uniting both animals and setting into a vigorous and harmonious organic whole. In this painting, as in his other mature works, Marc used a well-defined color symbolism: blue represented masculinity and spirituality, yellow femininity and gentleness, and red earthliness. Green, formed by combining blue and yellow and positioned opposite red on the color wheel, suggested the tension between spiritual and earthly existence.
Later work and death
In 1912 Marc’s admiration for the works of the French painter Robert Delaunay and for the Italian Futurists made his art increasingly abstract. He began to use the faceted space and forms of Delaunay’s brightly colored Orphist compositions to express the brutal power and timorous fragility of various forms of animal life; an example is Tyrol (1914), a work that approaches abstraction. Marc joined the German army in 1914, and he was killed in combat two years later.