Red deer I

In December 1910 Franz Marc wrote out a private theory of colour in a letter to his friend, the painter August Macke. Blue was the spiritual, masculine principle; yellow the gentle, feminine one; red was matter itself, brutal and heavy, the colour the other two had to overcome. He painted these deer that same year, and he painted them red. Marc was trying to stop looking at animals from the outside and instead see the world from inside them, giving the resting creatures the weight of that heavy colour. Within a couple of years the same code would run through his blue horses and yellow cow.