Mountains

Marc first laid this mountain landscape down in 1911, and back then the slopes were soft and rounded. Early in 1912 he went to Paris and called on Robert Delaunay, a French painter who was breaking the visible world into planes of pure, clashing colour. Marc came home and repainted the whole picture. The hills hardened into faceted shards and the light split into blocks of red, blue and green, as though the rock were being seen through a prism. He was a founder of the Blue Rider, the Munich group that wanted colour to carry feeling rather than copy nature. Marc did not have long. War came, he was called up, and he was killed at Verdun in 1916 at the age of 36. What Delaunay showed him is still here in the canvas, in the way a solid mountain is cut into shifting bands of coloured light.