Cows Red Green Yellow

In 1912 Franz Marc was working out a private grammar of colour with his friends in the Blue Rider circle in Munich, and animals were where he tried it. He held that yellow was gentle and female, blue spiritual and male, red the heavy, brutal matter the other two had to fight. So the three cattle here are not just bright: the yellow cow rears up light and quick, the massive form stretches out calm, the small red one leaps, and behind them a Bavarian valley breaks into blue mountains and orange fields. Marc trusted animals in a way he no longer trusted people. Four years after this he was dead at Verdun, killed at 36 in the war he did not live to see end.