Landscape with Animals

Franz Marc painted this in 1913, the last full year before the war that would kill him. He had come to believe animals were purer than people, closer to some honest way of being in the world, and he spent his short career trying to paint the world as an animal itself might feel it from the inside. By 1913 the forms have begun to break apart, the animals dissolving into the hills and colour around them until beast and field are nearly one fabric. Marc gave his colours fixed meanings, blue for the spiritual, yellow for a gentle joy, red for the heavy matter of the earth. Two years after this he was mobilised, and in 1916 a shell fragment killed him at Verdun, at 36. Shortly before, the German authorities had put him on a list of artists to be pulled back from the front, but the news arrived too late.