While Marc had painted horses earlier, those versions often portray domesticated or placid animals. With the major theme of his career, the horse. Although he had done several small horse subjects earlier, this work was the largest and most significant to survive. Marc's most important work of 1908 is Large Lenggries Horse Painting. Moreover, he believed that throughĪnimals he could represent his own spiritual feeling. A critical element in Marc's turn to this subject was a feeling that animals were somehow more natural or pure than people. One reason for Marc's interest in animals was that they represented, for him, a spiritual attitude. Beside an anatomical interest in these, as in his few pieces of sculpture, Marc's constant thematic concern is the relationship between animal and human spheres. The year 1907 marks the beginning of his sustained preoccupation with a variety of animal subjects. Like Van Gogh, Marc possessed the idea of the artist as martyr. Each saw life in religious yet tortured terms and each found transcendent effects in insignificant themes, echoing Symbolist notions. Marc and Van Gogh were clearly kindred spirits. Only in them are the symbolism, the pathos, and the mystery of nature to be found.” To paint a bit of the most ordinary nature, putting all one's faith and longings into it - that is the supreme achievement. Van Gogh is for me the most authentic, the greatest, the most poignant painter I know. Apparently freed from his period of despondency, he came under the influence of Paul Cezanne, Gauguin,Īnd Van Gogh, all of whom had a profound impact on the young artist. Marc's sudden trip to Paris in 1907 marks a major turning point in his career. That summer, in 1907, his marriage was dissolved. This period of anxiety came to a tumultuous end when, on his wedding night, following marriage to the painter Marie Schnur, he left for Paris. He spent summers in the mountains in 19 as well as traveling to Greece in 1906, attempting to His religious outlook was at odds with the Munich youth movement and the city's burgeoning bohemian atmosphere.

Unfortunately, Marc's artistic development was accompanied by melancholyĪnd upheavals in his emotional life. A trip to Paris in 1903 initiated an interest in Impressionism. Marc's stiff studio style begins to undergo a transition in subsequent years due to a variety of French influences. At this early stage in hisĭevelopment, Marc reflects the thematic concerns of such predecessors as Caspar David Friedrich in that the human being is dwarfed by the awesome appearance of nature. French Impressionist color innovations were still largely unknown. In the first years of the twentieth century, artistic training in Munich emphasized the traditional verities of academic naturalism and studio production. He studied drawing first with Gabriel Hackl and then painting with Wilhelm von Diez, both at the Munich Academy. But suddenly, in 1900, the ethical, high-minded youth turned to art. Finally, near the end of 1898, Marc gave up his goal of becoming a priest to study philosophy at But he mingled with his theological studies the Romantic literature of both England and Germany.

Marc was sufficiently moved by the background and his confirmation in 1894 that,įor the next five years, his goal was to become a priest. The family contemplated both the spiritual essence of Christianity and its cultural responsibilities. They and his great grandparents were aristocrats, with friends among artists as well as people of letters.įollowing the lead of his family, Marc studied theology intensely. Marc's grandparents, were amateur artists who copied the masters. His father, Wilhelm, was landscapist of 'curiously philosophical character', according to Franz his mother, Sophie, was anĪlsacian from a strict Calvinist tradition. Undeterred by theįamily's reaction, Marc quickly emulated their character, becoming know, while still a baby, as the 'little philosopher'.

According to his first biographyer, Alois Schardt, Marc was so ugly at birth that his father, when taking a first close look at his son at baptism, fainted.

Franz Marc was born on February 8,1880, in Munich.

Franz marc blue horse sculpture