Die Füchse

Franz Marc painted these foxes in 1913, when he was breaking animals down into shards of red and orange and blue, borrowing the fractured light of the French painter Robert Delaunay, a friend of the new abstraction. Marc believed animals saw the world more purely than people did, and he spent these years trying to paint how an animal might feel the world rather than how it looks. The foxes are barely foxes now, folded into a lattice of sharp planes, though you can still find the pointed snouts and the curl of a tail. A year later the war came and Marc went to the front. He was killed at Verdun in 1916, 36 years old, his name on a list the German army had drawn up of artists to pull back from danger, an order that reached his unit too late.