Cows Red Green Yellow

In December 1911 Franz Marc hung a picture of a single yellow cow, kicking up its heels, in the first Blue Rider exhibition in Munich, and no other painting of his drew more head-shaking. Alexander Kanoldt, one of his former colleagues in the Munich artists' association Marc had just left, called it a thoroughly miserable piece of work. The poet Theodor Däubler answered with a hymn to the animal, writing that the cow carries a drop of sun in its soul. That first canvas is now in the Guggenheim in New York. This is a later version from the same year. The yellow cow still leads, but Marc has set a red calf and a green bull behind her and replaced the Bavarian landscape with a night-black ground. Along the bottom run waves of orange, carmine and blue, a pairing Marc himself described as a thoroughly festive chord. The Lenbachhaus bought the canvas in 1960 from a Munich gallery.