Portrait of Franz Marc

Macke met Franz Marc in January 1910. He had seen Marc's lithographs in a Munich gallery and went to call on him the same day, and by September the two were at Tegernsee in Bavaria, painting each other in a race to see who would finish first. Macke's wife Elisabeth remembered that this one took about 20 minutes, in the last of the evening light. It is oil on cardboard and it stays at that speed, Marc in a fur cap with his pipe, set down in broad areas and clear colour. The next year Marc and Kandinsky founded the Blue Rider in Munich, with Macke closely involved. Macke was killed in Champagne in September 1914, at 27. Marc was killed near Verdun in 1916. Elisabeth gave the portrait to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1921, and in the 1930s, when German museums were being purged of work like this, the curator Paul Ortwin Rave took it into safekeeping himself.