Gran paisaje I

In 1909 Franz Marc left Munich for Sindelsdorf, a village in the Bavarian foothills where rooms were cheap and he could work outdoors all summer. The reddish horses standing in this landscape come a few years before the blue ones that made his name.

The canvas in Kochel is a fragment of what he made. The landscape was originally much bigger, close to two metres high and well over two across, and Marc cut it down himself to the group of horses and the ground beneath them. His wife Maria remembered him repainting it through the changing colours of the seasons before he took a blade to it. Pieces of the cut edges survive separately, and the Doerner Institut in Munich went over the pigments and the canvas for the museum, which reconstructed the presumed whole composition in black and white from a preparatory study.