Franz Marc was born in Munich, Germany in 1880. His father was a successful Munich landscape and genre artist who influenced him strongly. Marc studied at the Munich Academy. He left there for Paris, then went home full of the doings of the Fauves and Cubists. In 1911 he joined with Klee and Kandinsky to found a group called the Blue Rider (Blaue Reiter). Their members aspired to nothing less than painting the essence of things. They put feeling first, faithfulness to nature or to formal conventions last. They were the clear sweet dawn of German expressionism. a school that later languished from too much heaviness, bitterness and swagger.

For Marc, as for his friend and mentor, Kandinsky, implementation of new art forms was indeed a ...