Deer in the Snow II

On 22 February 1911, in the middle of a Sindelsdorf winter, Marc wrote to Maria Franck, the painter he lived with, that he was working hard and struggling for form and expression. There are no objects and no colours in art, he went on, only expression, and a picture is a cosmos that obeys quite different laws from nature. This square canvas comes from that year, and the Lenbachhaus counts it among the first in which he stopped describing animals the way they look. Two light brown roe deer are closed inside a snowy landscape, the one on the left with its back bent low, the one on the right lifting its neck and turning it back. The two of them fill a triangle, and behind them rises a heap of snow whose shadows, in deep blue and green, curve the same way the animals' outlines do.