Deer at dusk

In April 1910 Marc left Munich for good and settled in Sindelsdorf, a village in the Upper Bavarian foothills, where the animals he wanted to paint were in the fields outside the door rather than in the city zoo. This canvas was painted the year before that move. The dusk is built from small broken touches of green, violet and brown, close to the late impressionism he had been taught, and nothing in it yet points to the flat saturated colour he began using around 1911. The canvas is about a metre wide. The picture spent decades with the painter Gabriele Munter, who had kept a large part of the Munich avant-garde's work through the Nazi years and the war, and she gave it to the Lenbachhaus in 1960.