Le Destin des animaux

Franz Marc finished this in 1913, and on the back he wrote a line that reads now like a warning: and all being is flaming suffering. Slashing diagonals cut through a forest while animals — a blue deer arching its neck, horses, wild boar — brace against something breaking over them in red and green. A year later the First World War began. Marc went to the front, came to regard the painting as an eerie premonition of it, and was killed at Verdun in 1916. That same year the canvas was scorched in a warehouse fire, and his friend, the painter Paul Klee, repaired the burnt right-hand third from photographs, tinting it a muddy brown you can still pick out against Marc's original colour.