Femme dans le vent au bord de la mer

This seaside figure comes before nearly everything Franz Marc is remembered for, the blue horses and the animals dissolved into pure colour. In 1907 he was a young Munich painter still finding his way, and that year he made a decisive trip to Paris, where the work of Van Gogh and Gauguin struck him hard and began pulling his palette toward stronger, freer colour. You can feel that pull starting here, in a woman set against wind and water and simplified almost to a silhouette. The animal paintings and the Blaue Reiter circle he would help found were still a few years ahead, and so was the war that killed him at Verdun in 1916, at 36.