Franz Marc

Franz Marc had spent several hours on horseback, looking for the best place for his artillery regiment’s ammunition column to pass. Here and there, a few shells fell around the villages of Herméville and Braquis, abandoned by the French at the end of February 1916. It was Saturday 4 March 1916, and Marc couldn’t prevent himself from looking further afield to the Meuse Hills. In the pale light of the late afternoon, the line drawn by the tops of the hills across the grey horizon under the low sky looked bluish. It was a colour that German painter Franz Marc had worked with particularly often. With his paintbrush, he had made it the colour of the spiritual and of masculinity. It was this masculinity that had prompted him, like so many others and in particularly artists, to throw himself, of his own will, into the war in summer 1914. But the war had now been bogged down in the mud of the trenches for more than 18 months and the illusions that modern man would be regenerated by it had evaporated.

Marc had been confronted with the brutality and violence of the war early on, through the loss in September 1914 of his friend August Macke, like him a pillar of the Der Blaue Reiter expressionist group. The violence affected not only men but also animals, who in Marc’s eyes symbolised the genuine humanity that humans had lost. In particular, it was the horses, one of the main subjects of his paintings, that he saw suffer and die around him in great numbers. And yet, the fall of Fort Douaumont and the pursuit of the French across the Woëvre Plain had left him with a crazy dream of a decisive victory at Verdun.

Were these thoughts haunting him as he came out of Barquis village, when suddenly all the colours were blurred? With a crash, a shell exploded near him, violently, absurdly, planting a piece of shrapnel in his head. The 36 year old artist was mortally wounded. He was buried by his comrades from the Bayerische Ersatz-Feldartillerie-Regiment in the courtyard of Gussainville Chateau, until his widow had his body brought home to Kochel am See, in Bavaria, in 1917. And so one of the greatest expressionist painters of the early twentieth century perished in the hell of Verdun.