Weasels at Play

In 1911 Franz Marc was living at Sindelsdorf, a village in the Bavarian foothills, where he painted little except animals. That autumn he and Kandinsky walked out of the Munich artists' association they both belonged to and organised a rival exhibition, the first showing of Der Blaue Reiter, which opened in Munich that December. This picture of weasels dates from the same year, when Marc was assigning his own meanings to colour. Blue he called spiritual and male, yellow gentle and sensual, red heavy and earthbound, and he put those values into animals the way other painters put them into people. He had written to a friend asking how a horse sees the world. The painting came to the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2020 with the collection of Arnold and Joan Saltzman.