Playing Forms

In the spring of 1914 Franz Marc moved into a house at Ried, in the Bavarian foothills, and painted this long horizontal band with no animal anywhere in it. He had been looking hard at Robert Delaunay's window paintings, where colour alone carries the picture, and he takes it somewhere else: crystalline shards at one end, eruptions of colour through the middle, rounder growing shapes at the other, forms suggesting how crystals and plants build themselves rather than a city. That August he volunteered for the German army. He was killed by a shell splinter near Verdun in March 1916, at 36. The Museum Folkwang bought the picture in 1976, decades after the confiscations of 1937 had taken more than a thousand modern works out of the museum.