Les Moutons

Rotterdam dates this to 1913 or early 1914, the last stretch of work Marc had before the war. In the autumn of 1913 he had helped Herwarth Walden mount the First German Autumn Salon in Berlin, an enormous show of new European painting in a rented commercial space that lost a great deal of money, covered in the end by a Berlin industrialist who collected him. Marc was 33. He had a fixed scheme for his colours by then, blue for the spiritual, yellow for the gentle, red for heavy matter, and he painted animals rather than people because he thought animals had kept something people had lost. The sheep is folded into the ground by the same curves that build the landscape around it. He volunteered in August 1914 and was killed by a shell splinter near Verdun in March 1916.