Red and Blue Horses

In 1957 Gabriele Münter turned 80 and gave the city of Munich the pictures she had kept safe in her house at Murnau through the Nazi years, work by the painters of the Blue Rider circle and above all by her former partner, Wassily Kandinsky. This small sheet by Franz Marc reached the Lenbachhaus with that gift. Twenty years earlier the Nazis had stripped Marc's paintings from German museums and put some of them on show as so-called degenerate art. Marc made it in 1912, in tempera and watercolour over pencil, on paper about 46 centimetres wide. A red horse and a blue one stand with their heads lowered in a landscape broken into sharp, angled planes, and the museum reads the gaps opening in the foreground as abysses. His signature, painted in tempera, sits at the lower left.