Marc - Couverture souple

Franz Marc (1880-1916) became known principally for his images of animals: blue horses, yellow tigers, red fawns. What was it that led him to concentrate on painting animals? Marc himself explained his choice of subject matter in these words: I found people 'ugly' very early on; animals seemed to me more beautiful, more pure.
Seeing Marc merely as a painter of animals proves, however, premature. Marc, cofounder of the Blauer Reiter group of Expressionist artists, was deeply dissatisfied with the impurity of the world, and was on a quest for a universal art which would resolve the contrarieties of life in the harmony of creation. Using pure colors highly charged with symbolic values, adopting crystalline shapes, and absorbing the influence of Cubism, he moved steadily towards an abstract order of image, coming closer to his own understanding of a better world. At the age of 36, Franz Marc's life was cut short when he died in the Battle of Verdun.

Susanna Partsch (née en 1952) a étudié l'histoire de l'art à Heidelberg, puis au musée Wilhelm Hack de Ludwigshafen en Allemagne entre 1980 et 1985. Actuellement rédactrice free-lance à Munich, elle a écrit de nombreux livres sur Rembrandt, Gustav Klimt, Franz Marc et Paul Klee.