Works by Franz Marc

Franz Marc gave each colour a meaning, blue for the masculine and spiritual, yellow for feminine joy, red for violence, and painted animals in them; by 1914 some pictures, such as Broken Forms, had dissolved into abstract shapes.

Marc's father, Wilhelm, painted landscapes, and the son trained at the Munich Academy from 1900. In Paris in 1903 and 1907 he copied pictures in the museums and felt drawn to Vincent van Gogh. His early Two Women on the Hillside, from 1906, is laid on in thick, quick strokes: one woman sits in a white dress, the other lies in the grass under a striped straw hat.

One critic dates the change to the winter of 1910–11, when his animals began to stand out in unmixed colour. In Blue Horse I of 1911 a pale horse, shaded in deep blue, bows its head against hills of yellow, violet and red; in Yellow Cow a yellow cow with blue patches leaps between black tree trunks. In 1911 he founded the journal Der Blaue Reiter with August Macke, Wassily Kandinsky and others.

After meeting Robert Delaunay in 1912, and taken by Cubism and Futurism, he pushed further toward abstraction. The Foxes of 1913 folds two red foxes into crossing planes of red, green and violet. In Broken Forms, from 1914, no animal can be named any longer, only curls and bars of red, blue and green. That year he was drafted as a cavalryman, and in 1916 a shell splinter killed him at Verdun.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Bavarian State Painting Collections, Museum Kunstpalast, Lenbachhaus.