On September 12, 2026, K20 in Düsseldorf opens the first comprehensive Franz Marc exhibition at a German museum in more than twenty years. The title is "Die Suche nach einer besseren Welt" – the search for a better world – and it is well chosen, because Marc did not paint animals because animals are beautiful. He painted them because he had lost faith in the human being as a subject. His blue horses, yellow cows, and red deer are the most widely reproduced part of German Expressionism, and today they hang as posters in tens of thousands of homes, without many people knowing that the artist behind them died at Verdun when he was 36, or that his most iconic work has been missing since 1945. Here is the story behind the motifs – and how they work on a Swedish wall.
120 works in Düsseldorf – what K20 has actually brought together
The exhibition at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is on view in the museum's K20 building at Grabbeplatz 5 and runs through January 24, 2027. More than 120 paintings and works on paper have been borrowed from public and private collections in several countries, and the selection spans Marc's entire career – from the early, earthy studies to the late, almost completely dissolved compositions in which form begins to fall apart under the influence of Cubism.
The fact that more than two decades have passed since the last major German solo exhibition says something about how an artist's work can become so well known that it stops being examined. Marc's motifs appear on postcards, mugs, and classroom charts, but the works themselves have been scattered. The exhibition is a collaboration with Kunstmuseum Bern, and it is accompanied by a catalog from Hatje Cantz of around 176 pages, with approximately 130 illustrations and texts by, among others, Uwe Fleckner and Susanne Meyer-Büser.
The poster shows not a horse but a fox. "Fuchs (Blauschwarzer Fuchs)" from 1911, oil on canvas, 50 x 63.5 centimeters, belongs to the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal. The choice is telling: it is a small format, a curled-up animal, and a blue that is barely blue. The exhibition's audio guide is narrated by Felix Kammerer, the Austrian actor from the film adaptation of "All Quiet on the Western Front," which won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film in 2023 – another reminder of the war that lies at the heart of the whole story.
Quick facts: "Franz Marc. The Search for a Better World" is on view at K20, Grabbeplatz 5 in Düsseldorf, September 12, 2026 – January 24, 2027, with more than 120 paintings and works on paper. It is the first monographic Marc exhibition at a German museum in more than twenty years, produced in collaboration with Kunstmuseum Bern. Marc lived from 1880 to 1916, and his productive period spanned barely ten years.
The letter to Macke: blue as masculine, yellow as gentle, red as matter
On December 12, 1910, Marc wrote a letter to his friend August Macke that became one of the most quoted documents in German modernism. In it, he formulated his own color system: blue is the masculine principle, austere and spiritual. Yellow is the feminine, gentle and cheerful. Red is matter, brutal and heavy, the color the other two must confront and overcome.
The system doesn't hold up as a theory—Marc himself constantly departed from it—but it explains why his paintings look the way they do. When he paints a horse blue, it's not a decorative choice. He places the animal on the spiritual side of his own scale. When a cow is yellow, it's not a joke, and when the surrounding landscape blazes red, it's not autumn but resistance. The colors carry meaning, which is why the paintings still feel charged even to a viewer who has never heard of the system.
"He didn't paint animals as he saw them, but as he imagined they saw the world—and that's the difference between an illustration and a work of art."
Together with Wassily Kandinsky, Marc founded the editorial group Der Blaue Reiter in 1911, which published its famous almanac the following year. According to Kandinsky, the name was no profound construct: they both liked riders, Marc liked horses, and Kandinsky liked blue. The group's subsequent role in defining the spiritual branch of German Expressionism stemmed from both artists' view of art as a means of inner expression rather than representation. To learn more about the circle, read an overview of Gabriele Münter and Der Blaue Reiter's world of color and one about Kandinsky and the birth of abstract art.
The Tower with the Blue Horses – the work Göring took and no one has seen since 1945
"The Tower of Blue Horses" was painted in 1913 and measured 200 x 130 centimeters. Four blue horses stand stacked in a tower formation just to the right of center, facing the viewer but with their heads turned to the left. It is Marc's best-known painting and the one most often reproduced—which is remarkable, since no one knows for certain where the original is.
In 1936, Marc's art was branded "entartet" by the Nazi regime. The following year, the tower painting was hung in the infamous exhibition in Munich, but it was taken down after protests from war veterans: the artist had, after all, fallen fighting for Germany. In 1938, the work was confiscated by Hermann Göring. After the end of the war in 1945, it disappeared. Two unverified sightings in Berlin, in 1945 and 1948, are all that remain. Museum professionals believe the painting probably survived the war, but no one has been able to trace it any further.
This makes Marc an unusual case in art history: an artist whose major work exists solely as a reproduction. Every print, every image in a book, and every version of the image on a wall is effectively the only available form of the work. The question of what an original really means takes on a different poignancy in his case, since comparison with the original simply cannot be made. All that remains are the measurements, color notes, and the black-and-white photographs taken before the work disappeared.
The format is worth pausing over. At 200 x 130 centimeters, the tower painting was portrait-oriented, and its unusually narrow proportions heighten precisely what makes the subject so powerfully unsettling: the horses are stacked upward instead of standing side by side, like a building rather than a herd. Had Marc chosen a landscape format, the same four animals would read as a grazing group in a landscape. Now they read as a tower, hence the title.
The animal as a way away from humanity
Marc expressed early on that he found humans ugly and animals purer, more truthful. It sounds like romantic nonsense until you see how consistently he put it into practice. He studied animal anatomy, attended lectures at the veterinary college, and knew the musculature of a horse in detail - but he never painted an animal viewed from the outside. He tried to paint it from within, as a creature with its own experience of the landscape.
That is why his animals almost always merge with their surroundings. The deer lies in a forest whose forms echo the line of its back. The horse bends its neck in the same arc as the hill behind it. In the later works, from 1913 onward, the boundary almost completely disappears, and the composition becomes a field of crystallized forms in which the animal is only faintly discernible. Marc was moving toward abstraction when the war cut his life short on March 4, 1916, at Verdun.
There is a Swedish counterpart worth mentioning. Bruno Liljefors also worked with the animal as his main subject, but from the opposite perspective: in Liljefors, the animal is observed precisely in its natural environment; in Marc, it is a feeling. Comparing them side by side says more about both than any single analysis can.
Tip: If you're hanging a Marc-inspired motif, give it a wall of its own instead of placing it in a gallery wall. The colors are strong enough to stand alone, and they lose their impact as soon as they have to compete with several other motifs in the same field of vision.
Expressionist colors in a Swedish room – light, wall, and format
Marc's palette was designed for the light of southern Germany in Upper Bavaria, where he lived and worked, not for the November gloom of central Sweden. That matters. A deep cobalt that glows in the southern afternoon sun can look heavy and almost black in a northern room with a north-facing window. Motifs in this color range work best on a wall that gets daylight from the side, or under a directional lamp with high color rendering.
The wall color determines the rest. Against off-white and ivory, the strong colors read as a splash of color – clear, graphic, a little harsh. Against a warm gray or light clay-green wall, they soften and become part of the room. Against a dark wall, they gain depth but lose brightness; in that case, the motif should be large enough to hold its own against the background. Among the classic works of art and in the selection of animal motifs, there are several motifs with the same expressive use of color.
The format should follow the motif. Marc's compositions usually have a clear diagonal movement, and need space in the direction they move. Animals in groups and landscapes with sideways movement therefore work best in landscape format, while individual upright animals suit portrait format. A room that already has a lot of color is better suited to a smaller format than a large one – if you want a really bold look, the quiet wall in the bedroom or hallway is often a better spot than the living room. If you're looking for the same color temperature in a more abstract form, you'll find it among abstract motifs and in the selection of posters with a bold burst of color.
Frequently asked questions about Franz Marc and his motifs
You can find more about the exhibition at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, and the story of the missing tower painting is summarized in the encyclopedia entry on The Tower of Blue Horses. If you’d like to see how animal motifs were treated in Sweden during the same decade, read the article on Bruno Liljefors and Swedish nature art.
Franz Marc never got to see what his painting would become. What remains are the colors, the animals, and an empty space where the tower painting should have hung - and perhaps it is precisely that gap that keeps the motifs traveling out into the world, one wall at a time.