Establos

In the autumn of 1913 Berlin got the First German Autumn Salon, a very large international show of new painting mounted by the dealer Herwarth Walden, and Marc did much of the work of choosing and hanging it. The artist he pushed hardest for was Robert Delaunay, whose Paris studio he and his friend August Macke had visited the year before, and whose habit of breaking a picture into transparent planes of colour runs right through this canvas.

Horses had been Marc's subject for years, painted as animals with a rightness he thought people had mislaid. Here the planes cut straight through them, so that the horses and the building they stand in come apart into the same coloured shards.

He was called up in August 1914 and killed by shell splinters near Verdun in March 1916, aged 36.