Aufsteigender Nebel

In 1903 Franz Marc was 23 and had just left the Munich Academy, where the training still ran through careful drawing after plaster casts and old masters. That year he went to France for the first time and looked hard at the Impressionists in Paris, then went back to painting landscape. There are no animals in this one and none of the blue and red he became known for a decade later. It is fog lifting off a slope, oil on a piece of cardboard about half a metre wide. Marc was killed at Verdun in March 1916, and the following year an anonymous donor handed this small early picture to the Bavarian state collections in Munich, where it has stayed.