In the Rain

In April 1912 the Italian Futurists brought their travelling exhibition to the Sturm gallery in Berlin. Marc was wary of them at first and then came round, and within months their habit of slicing a scene into shards had turned up in his own painting.

By that year he had all but stopped painting people. He thought animals held a kind of innocence that human figures had lost, and he said so repeatedly. This canvas is his exception. He and his wife Maria are caught in a downpour near their house at Sindelsdorf in Upper Bavaria, their white dog Russi running out ahead of them. The rain comes down as a grid of hard diagonals, and it cuts through the two walkers as readily as through the air around them.