Grazing Horses IV

Karl Ernst Osthaus bought this painting in 1911 for his Folkwang museum at Hagen, which made it the first Franz Marc to enter a public collection. Marc was 31 and in the middle of working out what colour was for. In a letter to his friend August Macke he had set it down flatly: blue was the male principle, austere and spiritual, yellow the female, gentle and cheerful, red was matter, brutal and heavy. The horses here are red. In 1937 the German state took the picture out of the Folkwang, by then in Essen, as degenerate art. Two years later it went into the Lucerne auction where such confiscations were sold abroad for hard currency, and an American collector bought it. His family lent it to Harvard from 1991 and left it there outright in 2014.