Los pequeños caballos amarillos

By 1912 Franz Marc had worked out a private code for colour. Yellow, he wrote, was the gentle, cheerful female principle, while blue stood for the spiritual and severe. So these three horses, curled into the rolling hills of a landscape near Munich, are painted the way he felt animals experienced the world rather than the way they look. Marc had just helped found a loose circle of painters in Munich called Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider, and he believed animals were purer and more whole than modern people. Two years after this he went to the front in the First World War. He was killed near Verdun in 1916, at 36, leaving a notebook of abstractions he never got to paint.