Franz Marc was a pioneer in the birth of abstract art at the beginning of the twentieth-century The Blaue Reiter group put forth a new program for art based on exuberant color and on profoundly felt emotional and spiritual states. It was Marc's particular contribution to introduce paradisiacal imagery that had as its dramatis personae a collection of animals, most notably a group of heroic horses.

Tragically, Marc was killed in World War I at the age of thirty-six, but not before he had created some of the most exciting and touching paintings of the Expressionist movement.