The Little Monkey

Marc painted this small monkey in 1912, the year he and Kandinsky brought out the Blaue Reiter almanac in Munich and set about remaking painting around colour and feeling. Animals were Marc's chosen path into that. He believed a creature curled in a landscape saw the world more purely than people did, and he gave each colour a meaning of its own. The same year he travelled to Paris and met Robert Delaunay, whose splintered, prismatic light began breaking his forms into facets. You can feel that shift starting here, in the way the little animal and its setting fold into one another. Marc had four years left; he was killed at Verdun in 1916.