Franz Marc

Franz Marc found his subject almost by accident. Trained in Munich and drawn early to Eastern religious philosophy, he settled by 1910 on animals as his central theme, painting horses, deer, and foxes in saturated blues, reds, and yellows not to depict them naturalistically but as symbols of a spiritual world he thought untouched by human corruption. His 1911 painting Blue Horse I is typical, an ultramarine animal glowing against rolling hills, color used as feeling rather than description.

That year he met the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, and together they broke from the Munich group Neue Künstlervereinigung to found Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider, publishing an almanac in 1912 that became one of the founding documents of German Expressionism. Marc and Kandinsky shared a belief that abstraction could reveal a spiritual essence hidden behind ordinary appearances, and Marc's animal paintings grew steadily more fractured and prismatic as he pushed toward it.

He was drafted into the German army when the First World War began and was killed by a shell splinter near Verdun on 4 March 1916, at thirty-six. Germany's military command had drawn up a list of notable artists to be pulled from combat duty as culturally valuable; Marc was on it, but the reassignment order never reached him in time.