Franz Marc was a German painter, born in Munich in 1880, who gave his animals colors with fixed meanings: blue horses, a yellow cow, red deer. In 1911 he co-founded the Blue Rider group with Wassily Kandinsky. A shell splinter killed him near Verdun in 1916, at the age of 36. People look him up for the blue horses, and the blue was a code he wrote down himself.
The horses belong to the last five years of his life, and the war ended them.
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He explained the colors in a letter of December 1910 to the Mackes, the family of his friend August Macke. "Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual," he wrote. "Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the color which must be fought and vanquished by the other two!" In that code, a blue horse is an animal carrying the spirit.
The picture that tested the code hardest was The Tower of Blue Horses, finished in 1913. It stood more than six feet tall, hung in Munich and Berlin, and was admired as a landmark of Expressionism for as long as the Nazis stayed out of the museums.
In 1937 they took it. It was last seen in the 1940s, and nobody has found it since. The man who invented the code had been dead for more than twenty years when one of his best-known canvases vanished.
What You'll Discover
Why animals replaced people in his paintings.
What each of his colors was meant to say.
How the Blue Rider began.
Where the lost painting went.
What fire did to one canvas.
How his last day at the front ended.