Franz Marc (1880 –1916) was a German painter and printmaker who became known for the intense mysticism of his paintings of animals. Considered to be one of the key figures of the Expressionist movement in Germany, Franz Marc believed that colour had a vocabulary of emotional keys that we instinctively understand, much in the same way that we understand music. Franz Marc painted animals as they symbolized an age of innocence, an Eden before the Fall, free from the materialism and corruption of his own time. Animals in Marc's art prints are viewed as idealized creatures in perfect harmony with the natural world they inhabit.
