NOTE FROM N.M. WALT

     "The First Animals", 1913,was one of Franz Marc's many luscious canvases
featuring his magnificent blue horses.  These paintings, along with an earlier, much
less remarkable blue horse painting by Wassily Kandinsky, gave the name  to the 
journal and the artistic group known as the Blue Riders.  
     Despite Marc's progression into cubist and increasingly abstract forms, his vivid
palette and lush images are considered early manifestations of the Expressionist 
movement that dominated German art following World War One. 
     In addition to Kandinsky, artists associated with the Blue Riders include Paul Klee,
the German-Americans Albert Bloch and Lyonel Feininger, the composer/artist
Arthur Schoenberg, the Russian grandniece of Alexander Pushkin, Natalia Goncharova.
     Franz Marc's closest friend and Blue Rider artist, August Macke, was killed in action
in the Champagne sector of France, August, 1914.  Marc was killed at Verdun in 1916.