Landscape with house, dog and cattle

By 1914 Franz Marc's canvases were breaking apart into pure shape. That year he painted pictures he called Fighting Forms and Playing Forms, with no animals left in them at all. This one, from the same year, still holds on to the world outside. Its title names three things, and each of them can be found among the wedges of colour: a house at the upper left with its small window, a little white dog crossing the green field, and the cow at the right edge. Everything else, the red columns, the two red discs, the sharp diagonals, belongs to the new language he was working out. In August 1914 the war began and Marc was called up. The canvas, about 66 by 71 centimetres, is now in the private collection of Gabrielle and Werner Merzbacher.