Small Composition I

By 1913 Franz Marc's animals were dissolving. He had visited Robert Delaunay in Paris the year before and come away with the Frenchman's luminous, wheeling colour and the fractured planes of Cubism, and here the deer and horses have almost disappeared into pure rhythm and colour. This is a small canvas, about 46 centimetres tall, one of a short series of compositions he made as he moved toward abstraction. It was the last full year of peace. Marc volunteered when war broke out in 1914 and was killed at Verdun in 1916, at 36, before he could see where this direction led.