Sheep

By 1912 Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky had just launched the Blue Rider in Munich, a loose circle of artists convinced that painting could reach something spiritual behind the visible world. For Marc that something lived in animals. He was sure they carried an original purity that people had lost, and he spent these years painting them as a way toward it. Here two sheep, held together by little more than black outlines, dissolve into the colours of the field around them, so that where the animal ends and the meadow begins is hard to say. The picture later belonged to Herwarth Walden, the Berlin dealer who ran the Der Sturm gallery and did more than anyone to push this new art, and for a time it hung over his desk. Marc had only a few years left. He was killed at Verdun in 1916, at 36.