Animals in a Landscape

Marc finished this in 1914, the same year the war began that would kill him at Verdun two years later, at 36. You would not guess any of that from the canvas. Three cattle rest in a landscape that has dissolved into shards of red, blue and yellow, animal and ground and plant folded into one field of colour. Marc had worked out a private grammar for those colours: blue for the spiritual, yellow for a gentle joy, red for the heavy, earthbound world. He turned to animals because he thought they saw the world more purely than people did, and he built them a place where nothing is separate from anything else. The painting reached Detroit as a gift from the collector Robert Tannahill.