Franz Marc, born on February 8, 1880 in Munich and died on March 4, 1916 in Braquis, near Verdun, is one of the main representatives of German expressionism. Animal painter, engraver, pastellist, watercolorist, lithographer, writer, he was part of the group The Blue Rider.
Franz Marc's Biography
Franz Moritz Wilhelm was born on February 8, 1880 in Munich, to a father painter and teacher, Wilhelm Marc, and Sophie Maurice. His Protestant upbringing gave him a very open outlook on life. He took different directions, including those of a pastor or philosopher, before deciding on painting.
He entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, but the atmosphere there was too stifling for his taste and he did not stay. He met several animal painters in 1905, including Jean-Bloé Niestlé. Animals became his favorite subject. He made his first sketches of horses in that year.
He met Marie Schnür, a painter, whom he married in 1907, adopting her son, Klaus, whom she had had with Angelo Jank. He separated from his wife and then married the painter Maria Franck in 1913.
In 1907, he rediscovered Paris (after a first visit in his youth) and the art of Van Gogh and Gauguin. His palette became clearer and, in 1909, thanks to his meeting with August Macke, he began to make a name for himself and came into contact with many artists, as well as with the collector Bernhard Koehler. In 1910 he moved to Indersdorf near Dachau.
In 1911 he met Marianne von Werefkin, Alexi von Jawlensky, Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, with whom he founded Der Blaue Reiter, a group of avant-garde painters. He abandoned plein air painting and his palette became more and more subjective.
He began to paint, from this year, his famous Blue Horse which inspired the title of the famous almanac The Blue Rider, founding work of the group of artists that he generated. Then in 1912, influenced by an exhibition devoted to Italian futurism and by the paintings of Robert Delaunay, he turned to abstraction, his first work entirely in this style being Composition I, painted in December 1913.
In 1914, he volunteered to go to the front, where he worked again and again in a small notebook and indulged in abstract drawing. He was hit by shrapnel during a reconnaissance ride and died in March 1916, in Braquis, near Verdun, without having really finished his journey. He was temporarily buried in Gussainville, then in Kochel am See, a district of Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen in Bavaria, where a museum dedicated to him has been established.
Franz Marc's Works
His work is divided into three stages, from figurative to abstract. The best known part of his work is devoted to animal representations (mainly horse), where his theme is the life force of nature. He associates with the animal qualities - the good, the virgin, the beautiful and the true - that he does not find in man. He obscures all human representation in favor of the animal and the landscape is only the vital space in which the latter evolves.
He tries to paint the way the animal sees the world by a formal and chromatic simplification of things to represent the "absolute being". He attributes to each color a meaning; blue for the masculine, austere and spiritual; yellow for the feminine, sweet and cheerful, and red as the color of violence fought by the first two.
His progression from figurative to abstract was very gradual - purification of the lines, background of the painting no longer representing a landscape but flat colored areas, then liberation of the color of the main subject (Blue Horse) with geometric simplification -, between 1903 and 1914, which will have constituted a long journey (11 years) compared to his short life (36 years).
- 1909: Mare with foal, private collection
- 1910: Blue Horses, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Liège
- 1910: Horse in a landscape, Essen, Folkwang Museum
- 1911: Blue Horse I, Lenbachhaus Museum, Munich
- 1911: Blue Horse, Kunstmuseum (Bern)
- 1911: The Little Blue Horses, private collection, Hamburg
- 1911: The Yellow Cow, Guggenheim Museum, New York
- 1911: Fox (or Blue-Black Fox), Wuppertal, Von der Heydt Museum
- 1912: The Red Hinds, Kunstmuseum (Basel)
- 1912: The White Dog or The Dog facing the World, Zürich, Emil G. Bührle Foundation and Collection
- 1912: Mare with Foals, Zürich, Foundation and Collection Emil G. Bührle
- 1912: Cat on Yellow Cushion, oil on paper (60 × 49 cm), Halle, Museum Moritzburg
- 1913: The Fate of Animals, Kunstmuseum (Basel)
- 1913: The Little Yellow Horses, Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne
- 1913: Gazelles, private collection, Krefeld
- 1913: Dreaming Horse, watercolor, Guggenheim Museum, New York
- 1913: The Mandrill, Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne
- 1913: Three Horses II, Berlin. Neue Nationalgalerie
- 1913: The Unfortunate Tyrolean Country, Guggenheim Museum New York
- 1913: Reclining Bull, Essen, Folkwang Museum
- 1914: Landscape with a house, a dog and an ox, Merzbacher collection, Küsnacht
- 1914: Fighting Forms, Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne
- 1914: Stables, Guggenheim Museum, New York
- 1914: Small Composition III, Hagen, Museum Karl Ernst Osthaus
- 1914: Tyrol, Munich, Pinakothek der Moderne
- 1914: Scrolling Form, Essen, Folkwang Museum
Writings
- Franz Marc and Vassily Kandinsky, The Almanac of the "Blaue Reiter" (The Blue Rider), Editions Klincksieck, 1987 (1st ed. 1981) (ISBN 2-252-02567-0)
- Franz Marc, Letters from the Front, Fourbis, 1996 (ISBN 2-907374-98-2)
- Franz Marc, Écrits et correspondances, École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, coll. " Ecrits d'artistes ", 2006 (ISBN 2-84056-214-6)
Awards of Franz Marc
Several German cities have Marc streets: Fulda, Hamburg, Wolfsburg, Oldenburg, Puchheim, Vechta, Elmshorn, Heidelberg, Kochel am See, Cologne, Leverkusen, Sindelsdorf and Munich. On February 15, 1974, the Deutsche Bundespost issued a stamp with a value of 30 pfennigs reproducing the painting Roten Rehen.
The Ruhmeshalle in Munich displays a bust of Mark.
On October 13, 2000, an asteroid discovered in 1991 was named in his honor: (15282) Franzmarc.
A plaque is dedicated to him in Gussainville, the only plaque in France dedicated to a German soldier.
The Deutsche Post issued on February 9, 2012 a stamp with a face value of 145 cents.
In 2014, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the death of August Macke, the Kunstmuseum Bonn opened the exhibition "August Macke and Franz Marc. An artistic friendship". It presents for the first time the approximately 200 paintings that concern the artistic relationship between the two painters.
Franz Marc on the art market
In February 2008, the painting Horses in the Grass III was sold for a record price of 16.5 million euros at Sotheby's in London, double the estimated price. The buyer remained anonymous.
In June 2009, one of Franz Marc's last Impressionist paintings, Jumping Horses, also from 1910, fetched 4.4 million euros at Christie's, slightly below the estimated price.