Broken Forms

By the summer of 1914 Franz Marc had almost stopped painting animals. He'd built his reputation on blue horses and yellow cows, each colour carrying a fixed meaning in a private system he shared with the Blaue Reiter circle in Munich, red standing for matter and violence. Broken Forms keeps the colour and drops the animal almost entirely: overlapping planes and shards that no longer settle into a recognisable creature. It's one of the last things he made before the war. Marc enlisted that August, and in 1916 he was killed by a shell near Verdun, at 36, his name already on a list of artists the German army meant to pull back from the front. The order to spare him arrived days too late.