World Cow

By 1913 Franz Marc had decided that animals gave him a way into the world that people no longer could. He painted them over and over, convinced a horse or a deer carried a wholeness he found harder to see in human beings. Here a reclining cow spreads across the canvas as a warm, rounded mass, her body simplified toward the same curves and wedges that echo out through the hills behind her. The Latin subtitle he gave it, Bos Orbis Mundi, casts her as a kind of earth-creature, a whole landscape gathered into one animal. A Dutch collector, Willem Beffie, bought the painting directly from Marc in July of 1913.