Die großen blauen Pferde

In 1911 Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky were pulling together the Munich circle they would call Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider, and blue had become for them the colour of the spirit. Marc painted these three horses that year, their backs curving in rhythm with the red and green hills behind them. He had used four horses in an earlier version and cut it down to three. Marc believed animals saw the world more honestly than people did, and he spent his short career trying to paint the world as an animal might feel it rather than as a person sees it. He volunteered when war came in 1914 and was killed by a shell splinter at Verdun in 1916, aged 36.