Like no other artist, the German painter Franz Marc pursued the representation of the horse throughout his life. Co-founder, with Wassily Kandinsky, of the groundbreaking almanac 'Der Blaue Reiter', Marc was an eloquent champion of innovation in art. This publication offers an overview of Marc's paintings, drawings, and other works on paper, and a number of his much- loved painted postcards. Beginning with the studies made after nature in 1905/06, it embraces the series of dazzlingly colored horses painted after Marc's move from Munich to the Upper Bavarian village of Sindelsdorf in 1910, and ends with sketches produced shortly before Marc's death in 1916. Over this mere decade the image and notion of the horse became ever more important to Marc. As he strove for an "animalization of art" the horse emerged as the principal embodiment of a better, purer world. Through increasingly simplifying both form and color, Marc arrived at the stirring, monumental images of 1910-1913. But these in turn yielded to his search for ever purer forms of expression, a development culminating in the powerful abstract compositions of 1914. (German edition available ISBN 3-7757-0923- 1) The artist: Franz Marc (Munich 1880-1916 near Verdun). From 1900, studies at the Munich academy. Travels to Paris and acquaintance with Impressionism and the works of Vincent van Gogh. After 1910, contacts to August Macke, in 1911, the founding of 'Der Blaue Reiter' with Wassily Kandinsky.