Three Cats

By 1913 Marc had stopped setting animals inside a landscape and started building the creature and the picture out of the same splintered planes of colour. He had been in Paris the year before and seen Robert Delaunay's work with colour, and the broken-up motion of the Italian Futurists was in the air in Munich. He was living at Sindelsdorf, a village in Upper Bavaria, with animals around the house that he drew on constantly for subjects. This canvas is just over a metre wide, with three cats crossing and folding into one another, and it is signed with a single M in the lower right. Düsseldorf bought it in 1973. Marc volunteered in the autumn of 1914 and was killed by a shell splinter near Verdun in March 1916, at 36.