Young Boy with a Lamb; The Good Shepherd

In 1911 Franz Marc was living in Sindelsdorf, a village in the Bavarian foothills, and animals had become his main subject. Here a person steps into the picture. A naked boy wades through swirling water with a lamb slung over his shoulder, gripping its legs. That pose is one of the oldest in Christian art, the shepherd carrying a lamb home, which is why the painting is also known as The Good Shepherd, although the Guggenheim calls it simply The Shepherd. The canvas came to the museum through Karl Nierendorf, a Berlin dealer in modern German art who opened a gallery in New York in 1937. When Nierendorf died suddenly in 1947, the Guggenheim bought his entire estate, more than 150 works by Paul Klee among them, and the boy with the lamb entered the museum's collection in 1948.