The White Cat

In 1912 Franz Marc was pushing his animals toward something harder to read. That spring he and Kandinsky brought out the Blue Rider almanac in Munich, and over the next year or two his deer, horses and tigers would break apart into shards and beams of colour. This sleeping cat does none of that. It has clear contours and a real body, curled on a yellow cushion that lies on a red cloth scattered with golden stars. Painted in oil on cardboard, it is one of the best-loved pictures in the Moritzburg in Halle, a museum that bought Marc early and in depth. In 1937, when the Nazi campaign against "degenerate art" took seven of his paintings from the museum, this one stayed behind. Nobody knows why. One suggestion is that its calm, fairly realistic manner simply did not look modern enough to seize.