Nudes on Cinnabar

In the last months of 1910, working in the Bavarian village of Sindelsdorf, Franz Marc covered a whole canvas in one burning red, the pigment called cinnabar or vermilion. Two nude figures lean and stretch across it, their forms simplified and folded into the colour around them. Through that year Marc had been moving away from painting things as they look, toward building a picture out of colour and rhythm. He later described this as the first of his canvases in which space, movement and colour finally came together the way he wanted. The animals that crowd his later work are not here yet; the picture is almost all red, with the two figures set into it.