Nude with Cat

Early in 1910 a young painter called August Macke came to Franz Marc's studio in Munich, and the two of them went to see the Henri Matisse exhibition at the Thannhauser gallery. Marc was 30 and still working in the tempered browns of his academic training. What came out of that year is painting like this, where the figure and the cat are held inside heavy vermilion, yellow and green contours that the Lenbachhaus ties directly to the Matisse he had just seen. Later in 1910 he wrote a public defence of the Munich artists' association whose exhibition the local critics had savaged, and that letter brought him to Kandinsky. The museum bought this canvas in 1960.