Two Cats, Blue and Yellow

When Franz Marc painted these two cats in 1912, one deep blue and one yellow, he was working from a private colour code. In letters to his friend August Macke he had decided that blue was the masculine and spiritual principle and yellow the gentler, more sensual one, and he built his animals from those meanings as much as from anything he saw. The odder story is how the picture reached Basel. By 1937 the Nazi regime had condemned Marc as degenerate and pulled roughly 130 of his works from German museums. This canvas was among the modern pictures Germany sold off abroad, and in June 1939 it came up at auction in Lucerne. Basel's museum director, Georg Schmidt, was there and bought it, together with a Klee and a Dix from the same sale. The two cats have stayed in Basel ever since, one blue, one yellow.