Franz Marc

• 1. The Foxes At Verdun

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  In 2022, a painting called Die Foxes sold for 42,654,500 pounds, a record for the German artist Franz Marc. He never saw such sums. Born in Munich in 1880, Marc was struck in the head and killed instantly by a shell splinter at the Battle of Verdun in 1916. He was 36 years old. He had been drafted into the German Army at the start of World War I, and he died two years later. The same government that sent him to the front had quietly decided he was too valuable to lose. Notable artists were to be withdrawn from combat for their own safety, and Marc's name was on the list. The orders for his reassignment never reached him in time. Within two decades, a different German regime would brand him an enemy of culture. They called him a degenerate artist and stripped his work from museum walls. How did a painter of brightly colored animals end up at the center of a war, a death, and a campaign to erase him? And how did most of his work survive anyway, only to fetch tens of millions a century later?

• 2. A Theology Student Turns Painter

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  At the age of 17, Franz Marc wanted to study theology, following his older brother Paul down that path. His father, Wilhelm Marc, was a professional landscape painter, and his mother, Sophie, was a homemaker and a devout, socially liberal Calvinist. Two years after that early ambition, Marc changed course and enrolled in the arts program of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen. Required first to serve a year in the military, he began studies in 1900 at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. His teachers there included Gabriel von Hackl and Wilhelm von Diez. In 1903 and again in 1907, Marc spent time in France, especially in Paris, where he visited museums and copied many paintings to study and develop technique. Among the artistic circles he frequented in Paris, Marc met the actress Sarah Bernhardt and discovered a strong affinity for the work of Vincent van Gogh. His personal life during his 20s ran just as restlessly. He had a years-long affair with Annette von Eckhardt, a married antique dealer nine years his senior. He married twice, first to Marie Schnur and then to Maria Franck, both of them artists.

• 3. The Winter Something Awoke

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  "We can say that Franz Marc became an artist in the winter of 1910-11," writes Morgan Meis. "Something awoke in him, something came together." That year, Marc painted Nude with Cat and Grazing Horses. He showed works in the second exhibition of the Neue Kunstlervereinigung, the New Artists' Association, at the Thannhauser Galleries in Munich, where he was briefly a member. Meis describes the change in vivid terms. "Marc made the leap from artistic confusion to profound vision," he writes. "His animals began to emerge pure and true from the canvas. Color was the main thing. Such an explosion of color. Primary colors." Meis points to a red that stands out on the canvas in direct contrast with a swath of blue. He notes something counterintuitive about the years that followed. The element of abstraction in Marc's work grew stronger after this turning point, not weaker. The friendship that helped propel him began the same year, when Marc grew close to the artist August Macke in 1910.

• 4. The Blue Rider

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  In 1911, Marc founded the Der Blaue Reiter journal, whose name became synonymous with a whole circle of artists. He launched it alongside August Macke, Wassily Kandinsky, and others who had decided to split off from the Neue Kunstlervereinigung. The first Der Blaue Reiter exhibition ran at the Thannhauser Galleries in Munich between December 1911 and January 1912. As the apex of the German expressionist movement, the show traveled on to Berlin, Cologne, Hagen, and Frankfurt. In Berlin, the gallery owner Herwarth Walden displayed Marc alongside Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, and Alexej von Jawlensky. Known as the Storm exhibition, the collection reached Wuppertal in 1912. The Blue Rider is tied to Munich and to the color blue, which Marc believed held special qualities. This was the Wilhelmine period in Germany, dominated by academy art institutions, with Anton von Werner among the artists considered official taste. A new influence arrived in 1912, when Marc met Robert Delaunay, whose use of color and Cubist method reshaped his work. Fascinated by Futurism and Cubism, Marc painted increasingly stark natural abstract forms that found spiritual value in color. He painted The Tiger and Red Deer in 1912, then The Tower of Blue Horses, The Foxes, and Fate of the Animals in 1913.

• 5. The Language Of Color

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  Blue, for Franz Marc, meant masculinity and spirituality. He gave each color an emotional meaning or purpose in his work. Yellow represented feminine joy, and red encased the sound of violence. Across his career he made some sixty prints in woodcut and lithography. Most of his mature work portrays animals in natural settings, marked by bright primary color, an almost cubist treatment of animals, stark simplicity, and a profound sense of emotion. Even in his own time, that work drew notice in influential circles. One of his best-known paintings, Tierschicksale, translated as Animal Destinies or Fate of the Animals, hangs in the Kunstmuseum Basel. Marc finished it in 1913, when, as one art historian noted, "the tension of impending cataclysm had pervaded society." On the back of the canvas he wrote, "Und Alles Sein ist flammend Leid," which means "And all being is flaming agony." Later, serving in the war, he wrote to his wife that the painting "is like a premonition of this war - horrible and shattering. I can hardly conceive that I painted it."

• 6. Painting To Hide The Guns

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  By February 1916, in a letter to his wife, Franz Marc described a strange new application of his art. He had gravitated to military camouflage as a cavalryman in the Imperial German Army. His technique for hiding artillery from aerial observation was to paint canvas covers in a broadly pointillist style. He took pleasure in creating a series of nine such tarpaulin covers, in styles ranging "from Manet to Kandinsky." He suspected that the Kandinsky style could be the most effective against aircraft flying at 2000 m or higher. By 1916, Marc had been promoted to lieutenant and awarded the Iron Cross. The painter who had given red the sound of violence was now using paint to deceive the eye of war itself.

• 7. The Campaign To Erase Him

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  In 1936 and 1937, after the National Socialists took power, they condemned the late Marc as an entarteter Kunstler, a degenerate artist. They ordered approximately 130 of his works removed from German museums as part of a broader suppression of modern art. The Blue Horses was auctioned at the Theodor Fischer gallery degenerate art sale in Lucerne on the 29th of June 1939, and acquired by the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Liege. Another canvas, Landscape With Horses, surfaced in 2012 among more than a thousand paintings in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt. His father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, had been one of Hitler's four official dealers of Modernist art the Nazis called degenerate and sold to raise cash for the Third Reich. The painting The Foxes, made in 1913, carried its own wound. In 2017, the family of Kurt Grawi demanded its restitution from Dusseldorf's Kunstpalast. Grawi, a German Jewish banker who had owned it before the Nazis rose to power, was arrested on Kristallnacht and held in Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938. He fled to Chile in 1939. In 2021, the German Advisory Commission recommended that Dusseldorf return the painting to Grawi's heirs, who then sold it at Christie's in 2022.

• 8. What The Records Reveal

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  Marc's family house in Munich is marked with a historical plaque. Despite the Nazi campaign, most of his work survived World War II, and it now hangs in many eminent galleries and museums. The Franz Marc Museum opened in 1986 in Kochel am See, dedicated to his life and work, holding many of his paintings alongside those of other contemporary artists. The auction record tells its own story of rising regard. In October 1998, several of his paintings drew record prices at Christie's in London, including Rote Rehe I, or Red Deer I, which sold for 3.3 million dollars. In October 1999, Der Wasserfall, The Waterfall, sold at Sotheby's in London for 5.06 million dollars, a record then for Franz Marc and for twentieth-century German painting. In 2008, Weidende Pferde III, Grazing Horses III, broke that mark at 12,340,500 pounds, or 24,376,190 dollars. Today his work reaches far beyond Germany, held in collections from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York to the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Lenbachhaus in Munich, and the Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle.