Das blaue Pferd I

Franz Marc painted this young blue horse in 1911, in Munich, the same year he and Wassily Kandinsky broke away to form a group they called the Blue Rider. The colour is not decoration. Marc had worked out a private language for it, and he'd written to a friend that blue was the male, the stern and spiritual principle, yellow the soft and cheerful female one, red the brute matter that the others had to fight. So a horse the colour of deep sky is meant to carry a whole idea of the spiritual. The animal stands sideways with its head bowed, a solid cobalt shape against slopes of red, green and yellow that curve to echo its body. Marc had turned almost entirely to painting animals by then, convinced they were purer and more innocent than the humans around him. He was killed at Verdun five years later, at thirty-six, and never saw how far this way of painting would travel.