Small Blue Horses

In the summer of 1911 Marc was living in the Bavarian village of Sindelsdorf, working a horse motif over and over in pencil until he had it: three animals pressed into one another, their bodies simplified into circles that interlock. He had set out his private code for colour the previous December, in a letter to his friend the painter August Macke. Blue was the male principle, austere and spiritual. He then built almost the whole picture out of it. This is the smaller of the two canvases he made that year from the same idea. The big one, about a metre by a metre and eighty, went to Minneapolis and is known as The Large Blue Horses, which is why the two get mixed up so regularly. Stuttgart bought this one in 1978 with money from the state lottery.