Timeline: Towards Abstraction Franz Marc was born on February 8,
1880, in Munich, Germany. He studied at the Munich Art Academy
and traveled to Paris several times where he saw the work of
Gauguin, Van Gogh, and the Impressionists. With Kandinsky, he
founded the almanac "Der Blaue Reiter" in 1911 and organized
exhibitions with this name. He was a principal member of the
First German Salon d'Automne in 1913. At the beginning of World
War I, he volunteered for military service and he died near
Verdun, France, on March 4, 1916. Franz Marc was a pioneer in
the birth of abstract art at the beginning of the twentieth-
century The Blaue Reiter group put forth a new program for art
based on exuberant color and on profoundly felt emotional and
spiritual states. It was Marc's particular contribution to
introduce paradisiacal imagery that had as its dramatis personae
a collection of animals, most notably a group of heroic horses.
Tragically, Marc was killed in World War I at the age of thirty-
six, but not before he had c