Cattle

In 1937 the Nazi regime removed Franz Marc's paintings from German museums as degenerate art. In 1948, three years after the war, Cologne's Wallraf-Richartz Museum acquired this small picture of cattle, painted in 1913 in oil on a piece of cardboard about 30 by 51 centimetres. A red cow stands at the centre, a black animal lowers its head beside it, and long curved bands of colour sweep across them both, cutting the pasture into angled planes. In 1913 Marc often broke his scenes into facets like this, a change that followed his visit in the autumn of 1912 to the French painter Robert Delaunay in Paris. When the city founded the Museum Ludwig in 1976, its 20th-century holdings moved there, and this picture went with them.