Franz Marc was an important painter of German Expressionism. Together with Wassily Kandinsky, he was a founding member of the artists' group 'Der Blaue Reiter'. His Expressionist mature work was almost entirely devoted to the depiction of animals, which he imbued with great symbolic charisma through colour and form. In his quest for introspection and spiritual catharsis through art, he found in the creatures he painted an inviolate purity.
"I try to heighten my sensitivity to the organic rhythm inherent in all things, try to hone a pantheistic empathetic sense for the quivering and trickling blood in nature, in trees, in animals, in the air […] I see no more felicitous means to ‘animalise’ art than the depiction of beasts. That is why I resort to the genre." Franz Marc, 1910
In the few years between 1911 and 1914, Marc created an eminent oeuvre; in 1914, he also produced several abstract compositions, although these works never deny their roots in the organic world. When World War I broke out, Marc was drafted and sent to the French front; he was killed near Verdun in 1916.
