Maria Marc’s Letters

Maria Marc hovers like a ghost at the edges of Franz Marc’s oeuvre. Married to one of the leading artists of the Expressionist generation, her role in the movement continues to be obscure. She is the ever-present cipher in the heroicBlaue Reiter(Blue Rider) narrative, the kind face looking obliquely out from photographs of Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, artists who have long been canonized in the history of German modernism (fig. 11.1). Maria Marc too was a practicing artist, yet few people think of her as more than Franz Marc’s unobtrusive companion, if they think of her at