Small Composition IV

Marc painted this in 1914, the year his world was about to break. He was one of the leaders of the Blaue Reiter, a circle of Munich painters after a spiritual art built from pure colour, and by now he was moving past his famous blue horses toward pictures with almost no animal or landscape left in them. The small compositions were his testing ground for that shift, and this fourth one pushes further than the others into loose, floating shapes and broken colour. He never declared it finished. That August the First World War began, Marc volunteered, and in 1916 a shell killed him near Verdun. He was 36. The unfinished canvas stayed with his widow, Maria Marc, and passed through her estate until 1982.