Monkey and Man

Monkeys turn up more than once in Franz Marc's work in these years. In 1911 he painted a long Monkey Frieze, now in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, and in 1912 the Little Monkey, which also belongs to the Lenbachhaus. This much smaller canvas, about half a metre tall, puts the animal together with a human being, as its title says. Little is recorded about how it was made. It reached the museum in 1962 as a gift from the painter Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky's companion in the Blue Rider years, who died that spring. The museum dates the picture only to around 1912.