Franz Marc and his wilder-than-Instagram paintings
Stefan Dege kbm
February 7, 2020
Chances are, you've owned a poster or sent a postcard with Franz Marc's art on it. His take on nature was radical, but beautiful. Marc was born 140 years ago, on February 8, 1880.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/O. Berg
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Franz Marc: A 'Blue Rider' in Bavaria
German Expressionist painter Franz Marc was a pioneering artist. February 8,1880 marks the 140th anniversary of his birth. A tribute to one of the founding members of the artists' group "The Blue Rider."
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Gebert
Inspiring landscapes
Franz Marc was born in Munich in 1880. Even as a child, he spent his holidays in the area around Lake Staffelsee. Later the village of Sindelsdorf would become his summer refuge. In 1914, Franz Marc and his wife Maria moved into a villa in Ried, a district of Kochel am See. Here in the Bavarian countryside people lived in harmony with nature. This simple life inspired much of Franz Marc's work.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Gebert
Beloved animals
Paintings like "Red Deer II" from 1912 broke with the traditional way nature was represented in art. Today they're popular and iconic artworks. Franz Marc felt drawn to nature and demonstrated empathy for animals. His depictions of them used colors, shapes and lines in a way that hadn’t been seen before.
Image: Franz Marc Museum Kochel am See
Artistic beginnings
Franz Marc studied painting at Munich's Academy of Fine Arts. In Paris he discovered the painting styles of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse and was fascinated by them. While looking for motifs to paint, he often went for hikes. During this memorial year, two murals Franz Marc painted on the walls of an alpine hut on Rabenkopf mountain can be visited by appointment.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/P. Kneffel
From painting to fighting
The First World War put a stop to an incredibly productive phase of Franz Marc’s career. The artist was conscripted in August 1914. The letters Marc wrote to his wife Maria from the front are touching testaments to their love. He wrote his last card to her the morning of the day he died. Franz Marc was killed by a piece of shrapnel during the Battle of Verdun in 1916. He was just 36 years old.
Image: Franz Marc Museum Kochel am See/Mitte: picture-alliance/dpa
A place of remembrance
Franz Marc is buried in the town he called home: Kochel am See. Since 1986 there's been a museum dedicated to him there. In 2008 an extension was added to the building. In 2016 the museum hosted an exhibition trilogy "Franz Marc - Between Utopia and Apocolypse" as well as various events to mark the centenary of the artist's death.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Foto: T. Kujat/Tourist Information Kochel
Motifs and motivation
Franz Marc painted cats, dogs, cows, deer, foxes, tigers and horses. He liked to depict animals and even showed them dreaming. His original "Blue Horse I" (1911), which hangs in the Lenbachhaus art museum in Munich, is symbolic of the progressive energy of the Blue Rider movement. Its artists defied the conventions taught in art schools and opted for more expressive forms, including abstract art.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/F. Hörhager
Marc's circle of friends
Painter Gabriele Münter and her partner, Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, also settled in idyllic Upper Bavaria. Their house in Murnau became a meeting place for avant-garde German and Russian painters. Together with Franz Marc, August Macke, Paul Klee, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin they formulated their ideas for a new kind of art in "The Blaue Reiter Almanac."
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/H. Ossinger
The symbolism of colors
"Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual. Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the color which must be fought and vanquished by the other two!" That's what Franz Marc wrote to his friend August Macke in 1910. His painting "The Yellow Cow" (1911) has been the property of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation since 1949.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/F. Gambarini
Blue country
Another one of Franz Marc's legacies is the term "Blaues Land" or "blue country," which he coined to describe the area between Murnau and Kochel. The ever-changing blue tones in the landscape's ambient light are a fascinating sight - and not just for painters. Tours bring visitors to places that were sources of inspiration for the works of "Der Blaue Reiter."
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/H. Ossinger
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Artist Franz Marc (1880-1916) was a rebel. He thought his contemporaries were too materialistic, too intellectual and too prone to believing in technology. He countered these beliefs with his art, painting innocent animals that harmonized with nature and wildly colored tableaux. A tree could be blue or a hare purple, resulting in whimsical worlds that could easily rival modern-day photo filters.
The blue horse became Marc's trademark. Like other artists of the pre-World War I avant-garde period — cubists, futurists and those from the expressionist arts collective "Die Brücke" (literally, "the bridge") — Marc did not paint nature as he saw it.
"He formulated an analogy, a new way of painting," said Klingsöhr-Leroy. "He'd probably share Joseph Beuys' understanding of art, which says we should listen more to our feelings, and that every person is an artist and is free to shape his or her own existence."
The stuff of dorm room posters and horse films
Marc's works are so widely aesthetically pleasing that even today they are popular motives for postcards and posters. According to his biographer Brigitte Rossbeck, they are among the most frequently reproduced works in recent art history. The artist's famous horses are even referenced in the 2014 German children's film Bibi & Tina: Voll verhext ("Bibi & Tina: Totally Bewitched").
According to Marc, 'Blue is the male principle ... yellow the female principle…'Image: picture-alliance/dpa/F. Gambarini
Marc's paintings were not always so popular, however. During the Nazi period, they were deemed "degenerate," along with those of the artist collective he belonged to. The group, dubbed The Blue Rider ("Der Blaue Reiter"), also included his famed colleagues Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Marc's close friend August Macke.
Marc and Kandinsky co-founded The Blue Rider in 1912 after leaving another collective in Munich known as the Neue Künstlervereinigung.
A native of Munich, Marc kept in contact with many other artists of his day, from composer Arnold Schoenberg to Dadaist Hugo Ball.
A casualty of the Great War
Marc wasn't granted a great deal of time to carve his name into art history. He was not a pacifist but was among the Germans that welcomed World War I. "My heart is not turned against the war," he wrote in November 1914 to his friend Kandinsky, adding, "but I am deeply thankful." The war, Marc hoped, would "cleanse" Europe.
A year and a half later, he would fall at the Battle of Verdun at the age of 36. He left behind 244 oil paintings and 261 drawings and water colors.
Marc was buried in Kochel am See in Bavaria, where he had lived as a young art student. A museum was dedicated to his memory in 1986.