Drei Pferde II

In the autumn of 1913 Marc was in Berlin helping Herwarth Walden hang the First German Autumn Salon, more than 300 works by Delaunay, Klee, the Italian Futurists and artists from a dozen countries, in a rented building on Potsdamer Strasse. He was 33 and had been painting almost nothing but animals for years, on the grounds that they saw the world more honestly than people did. The colours carried fixed meanings for him. Writing to his friend the painter August Macke in December 1910 he had assigned them: blue for the masculine, hard and spiritual, yellow for the feminine, gentle and warm, red for matter, brutal and heavy, the thing the other two had to fight. He volunteered in August 1914. A shell splinter killed him near Verdun in March 1916, shortly after the German army had put him on a list of artists to be withdrawn from combat.