Franz Marc: The Complete Works

Franz Marc (1880–1916) was a leading member of the Blue Rider group which also included the painters Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, August Macke, Paul Klee and Alexej Jawlensky. The group marked the high point of German Expressionism and has had a profound influence on international art and culture since.Marc's luminous paintings of animals have the sacred mystery and contemplative quality of early human cave art rendered in Technicolor. His later compositions, increasingly abstract, are breathtakingly virtuosic and possessed of rare and vertiginous beauty. The dazzling scope of the works in pencil from his last days, recorded in the 'Sketchbook from the Battlefield', attest to the huge loss to culture that was the premature death of this singular talent when he was killed in the World War I.Volume 1 illustrates all 244 of Marc's oil paintings, with complete details of chronology, provenance, literature and exhibitions, as well as including investigations of the artist's technique and its evolution.Volume 2 is devoted to the watercolors, works on paper, sculpture and decorative arts.The third and final volume of this catalogue raisonné includes, along with other material, Marc's thirty-two sketchbooks, which contain the many hundreds of drawings he made – some autonomous, some studies for other work – which together provide profound and intriguing insights into his art. The entries total more than a thousand sketchbook pages, of which over half are reproduced here for the first time, all in full color. Together this major work provides the ultimate reference work for art lovers, art historians and collectors, offering fresh insights into the work of Franz Marc and the Blue Rider group as a whole.