Franz Marc

Franz Marc painted animals, above all horses, in pure, unnatural colour: blue horses, yellow cows, red deer. He gave each colour a meaning, blue for the spiritual and masculine, yellow for gentle joy, red for heavy matter and violence, and he believed animals lived in a purer relation to nature than people.

Born in Munich, he studied at the Munich Academy and visited Paris, where he discovered Van Gogh. In 1911 he founded Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) with Wassily Kandinsky, and his close friend August Macke joined them. His later works break the animals and landscape into prisms and facets, close to abstraction. He was killed at Verdun in 1916, aged 36. His work is in the Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Guggenheim in New York, the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Franz Marc Museum in Kochel am See.

Blue Horse I (1911), in the Lenbachhaus, is one of his best known images: a young horse in deep blue against a landscape of red, yellow and green.