Franz Marc - The Expressionist Animal Painter
Franz Marc was a German Expressionist painter born in Munich; he studied philosophy and theology at the University and then painting at the Academy. He was one of the founders of the Blaue Reiter group in Munich in 1911. Working in close association with Kandinsky, Marc explored the expressive values of colour. This preoccupation with colour was partly inspired by the Orphist paintings of Delaunay, whom he visited in Paris with Macke in 1912, and probably also by Goethe's Farbenlehre. Although he remained a painter of animals, paintings like Tiger (1912) are primarily expressive through their simple planes of colour; and in Fighting Forms (1914) he was nearing a point of abstract expressionism. Yet Marc never turned to animal paintings as a genre. Rather, his groups of horses and deer are substitutes for people in his art. When World War I broke out he joined the army voluntarily and with great enthusiasm. Later he was killed at Verdun in 1916.