Three horses at the watering place

Marc had settled what his colours meant before he painted this. In a letter to his friend August Macke in 1910 he wrote it down, blue is the male principle, austere and spiritual, yellow the female one, gentle and cheerful, red is matter, heavy and brutal, and mixtures inherit the consequences. In this small tempera sheet the two animals in the middle are red and green, turned in opposite directions, a third one at the left is black, and the water they are drinking is a hard blue. Karlsruhe dates the sheet 1913 to 1914. Those were the months when Marc was helping the dealer Herwarth Walden assemble the First German Autumn Salon in Berlin, more than 300 works by avant-garde painters from across Europe, hung in a rented showroom in the autumn of 1913.