The Dream

Franz Marc painted The Dream in 1912, at the center of the Munich circle he and Wassily Kandinsky called the Blue Rider. A woman sits asleep and naked, and the animals around her, blue horses, a yellow lion, red-roofed houses, seem to rise out of what she is dreaming. For Marc the colors were a private language: blue stood for the spiritual and the male, yellow for the gentle and female, red for the earthly force the other two had to master. He gave the picture to Kandinsky as a gift soon after finishing it. Four years later Marc was dead at Verdun, killed in March 1916 at the age of thirty-six.