Franz Marc Biography
Franz Marc was born on 8 February 1880 in Munich and was one of the key members of the German Expressionist movement. After completing his military service, Marc decided to pursue an artistic career and enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 1900. During this period, he traveled to Italy and stayed in Paris, visiting museums and gaining knowledge of many techniques pictorial, while making copies of several paintings. In 1911, Marc and Vassily Kandinsky founded the art group Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Knight), planning to publish the Almanac of the same name annually but, in reality, it was published in only one issue in 1912. The group set out to create a art in which the artist's inner expression was the main component, even if this meant totally ignoring external reality. Kandinsky was the first painter to undertake the path of total abstractionism.
Marc attributed a specific emotional meaning to each color he used in his paintings: blue indicates masculinity and spirituality, yellow symbolizes feminine joy, and red represents the vigor of violence. He used these techniques to paint animals in bright primary colors, approaching cubism through the simplicity of the forms. The Der Blaue Reiter group was disbanded shortly thereafter, and their last exhibition was held in 1914. The same year, Marc, at the age of twenty-four, volunteered for the First World War. Marc died on March 4, 1916, killed by a grenade splinter in the Battle of Verdun.
