Maria Franck-Marc

In the catalogue of the second Blue Rider exhibition, held in Munich in 1912, one exhibitor is listed as Maria Franck-Marc, Sindelsdorf, Upper Bavaria. The double name ran ahead of the law. She and Franz Marc had travelled to London the summer before to marry and found they could not, and they were only legally married in 1913. She showed three works on paper, and one, a scene of sheep on matchstick legs dancing in pairs around a toppled shepherd, was among the few sheets reproduced in the catalogue.

She was born in Berlin in 1876 and trained there as a drawing teacher. In Munich she studied at the school of the women artists' association, because the academy did not take women, and in the summer of 1905 she painted in Worpswede, the artists' village near Bremen. From 1908 her own territory was the world of children, their toys and their games, in strong flat colour with an odd, comic edge. Rheumatism in her hands, which began in 1907, kept that body of work small.

After Marc was killed in 1916 she devoted much of her life to his estate. She turned to textiles, enrolled in the weaving workshop of the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1922, and exhibited her own work only once, 11 tapestries at a Munich gallery in 1952. The first exhibition of her paintings came in 1995, at the Lenbachhaus, 40 years after her death.