Das arme Land Tirol

Franz Marc traveled through Tyrol in the spring of 1913 and came home uneasy. The mountains had impressed him, but he sensed that an isolated border region like this would be among the first to suffer in a European war. On the edge of the continent the Second Balkan War was grinding on that year, and Marc read it as a warning of something larger coming. So the Tyrol he painted is a wrecked one — crumbling peaks, gaunt horses, and a small cemetery of crosses under a blood-red sky, with an Austrian border post marking the frontier at the lower left. Marc reworked the canvas in 1914, the year the larger war finally arrived. He was killed at Verdun two years after that.