Reh im Walde II

By 1912 Franz Marc had mostly stopped painting people. He had come to feel that animals held onto a kind of innocence the modern world had lost, and he tried to paint the forest the way a deer might feel it from the inside rather than see it from outside. So the woods here are not a backdrop. The reds, greens and blues break the animal's body into the same rhythms as the trees and light around it, until you have to look twice to find the deer folded into the ground. That year he and Kandinsky were assembling the Blue Rider almanac in Munich, arguing that colour and form could carry feeling on their own. Marc was 32, and had four years left before he was killed at Verdun.