Lankheit franz marc biography
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Between Something and Nothing: Franz Marc’s Authorial Ether
A painter and writer who was born and lived most of his life in Bavaria, Franz Marc was one of the key protagonists in the great European debate on the nature and the goals of art at the beginning of the 20th century. Marc’s and Wassily Kandinsky’s 1911 hybrid art-book the Blaue Reiter Almanac was immediately hailed as a turning point in the practice of artists providing theoretical frameworks for viewing their work, and thus in the discipline of art history itself.i Because of Marc’s famous contributions to the Almanac and his tendency to produce in prose a tantalizing amalgam of passion and wit, his writing is seemingly easily accessible and has been categorized in German scholarship simply as an artifact of Expressionism.ii
Since his death in 1916, several circumscribed collections have been published of Marc’s letters and essays. While clearly the djur has the central position in Marc’s painted oeuvre, I maint
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Letters from the War
Translated by Liselotte Dieckmann- New Edition by Klaus Lankheit & Uwe Steffen
by Beate Goree (Author)
©1992Others 124 Pages
The Arts
Series: American University Studies , Volume 16
Summary
The letters by the German painter Franz Marc (1880-1916) were written to his wife Maria from the beginning of World War I (August 1914) to the moment of his death in battle on March 4, 1916. While they contain lively descriptions of his activities behind the front line, they are mainly his personal thoughts on many subjects, such as literature, art, and religion. He discusses authors such as Tolstoy and gives beautiful descriptions of both the natural surroundings of Alsace and its cities.
The letters were first published by Marc's wife in 1920. A new edition was prepared in 1982 by Professors Lankheit and Steffen. The edition here is translated by Liselotte Dieckmann.
Details
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Franz Marc
The German artist, Franz Marc, was one of the founding members of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), an important group of Expressionist artists active in the run-up to World War I. He was best known for his vividly coloured paintings of animals, with the blue horse a favourite subject.
Marc was born in Munich in 1880, inheriting an interest in art from his father Wilhelm, a landscape and genre painter. After shelving plans to become a priest, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in his home city. He soon grew dissatisfied with the naturalist style espoused there, however.
A pair of visits to Paris, in 1903 and 1907, proved crucial to his career progress, with Marc discovering the work of the Impressionists, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. His palette became highly saturated thereafter, and his colours invested with emotional and symbolic meaning. Marc now used yellow and blue, for example, to symbolise the feminine and the masculine respectively.
In 1911, h