The story
Franz Marc painted blue horses and red deer, animals set into landscape in bold flat colour, and much of that landscape is right here. He spent his last years in the Bavarian foothills around Kochel am See, an hour south of Munich, before he was killed at Verdun in 1916, still in his thirties. In 1986 a museum devoted to him opened in the town, and in 2008 it moved into a new building on a slope above the lake, with the countryside he painted visible through the windows.
Marc was a founder, with Wassily Kandinsky, of Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider circle of Munich painters who pushed German art toward abstraction just before the First World War. The collection holds a large body of his own work and sets it beside Kandinsky, Paul Klee and later German painters, so the room he came from and the movement he started share the same view of the mountains.
