Cheval dans un paysage

In 1910 Franz Marc was 30 and just starting to let colour off its leash, the year he grew close to the painter Wassily Kandinsky and the Munich circle that would soon call itself the Blue Rider. This is one of the first canvases where he does it. A horse stands with its back to us, looking out over a landscape broken into patches of yellow, red and green. Marc turned the animal away on purpose, so that we see the field through its eyes rather than ours. He believed animals held a more honest way of being in the world than people did. He painted only a handful more years. Marc volunteered in 1914 and was killed at Verdun in 1916, aged 36.