Chien couché dans la neige

The dog is real. It was Marc's own, a white sheepdog named Russi, curled up asleep in the snow. He painted it over the winter of 1910 into 1911, the same months he fell in with Kandinsky in Munich and the two began putting together Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider — their push toward a freer, more spiritual use of color. You can watch that shift starting here, in a plain domestic subject. Marc got interested in one problem above all: how do you paint a white animal on white ground, when the fur and the snow are almost the same color. So the shapes go simple and blocky, and Russi almost dissolves into the drift he is lying in.