Franz Marc

Franz Marc was born in Munich in 1880, where he began studying painting at the city’s premier art school, the Akademie der bildenden Künste, in 1900. On trips to Paris he was able to study works by Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Beginning in 1910 he painted increasingly stylised animal pictures, like Dog Lying in the Snow. In his paintings Marc used colours symbolically so as to express the harmonious integration of animals in their natural habitats. He had his first exhibition in 1910 and in 1911, together with artist colleagues, he founded the Blauer Reiter group, which was joined by Wassily Kandinsky and August Macke. Influences from early and later Cubism and from Futurism can be seen in his increasingly abstract works. In 1914 Marc volunteered for military service, and in 1916 he died at the front near Verdun.