Hay stacks in the snow

Early in 1911 Franz Marc was painting around Sindelsdorf, in the Bavarian foothills, where stacks of hay stood out on the wet moorland meadows all winter. Here three of them rise out of the snow, pared down to plain cones with white caps, coloured cinnabar red, yellow-green and orange-red. In that white, undefined space they could as easily be a row of mountains, or enormous pieces of fruit. That winter Marc was testing how pure colours behaved side by side, at times checking their relations through a glass prism. The subject is rare for him. He was painting almost nothing but animals then, and he had tried stacks like these only once before, in a much quieter, naturalistic picture of 1909. He showed this canvas in May 1911 at the Galerie Thannhauser in Munich, and in 1999 it was bought from a private owner for the Franz Marc Museum at Kochel, not far from where it was painted.