Horses and Eagle

Franz Marc gave this 1912 painting no foreground and no background. A yellow horse, a red horse and a blue eagle are fitted into a landscape of angled planes, with a green tree rising between the two horses, and the animals are built from the same facets of colour as the ground they stand on. The canvas belongs to the Lower Saxony State Museum in Hannover, a large regional museum of natural history, archaeology and art. Visitors find it across town, though. In 1969 the chocolate maker Bernhard Sprengel gave the city his collection of modern art and money toward a building to house it. When that building opened in 1979 as the Sprengel Museum, the state museum moved its own modern holdings there as a permanent loan, and this picture is one of the paintings it keeps there.