Mandrill

In 1913 Franz Marc kept a sketchbook of coloured drafts for the important paintings of his last years, and this page holds the first idea for one of them. The ape is laid in with an artificial blue-green, in watercolour and tempera, while circles and triangle segments of landscape and sky are drawn around it in fine pencil. The sheet is only about 22 centimetres tall. Decades ago the whole sketchbook was broken up and sold page by page, which is how this leaf came to Munich on its own. The painting it led to turned the composition on its side and scattered the mandrill into a jungle of coloured splinters. That canvas hung in the Hamburg Kunsthalle until 1937, when the Nazi government seized it as degenerate art. The numbers pencilled in the lower right corner of this sheet were probably added by Marc's wife, Maria.