Gatto dietro un albero

Around 1910 Franz Marc worked out a private language of color. In letters to his friend the painter August Macke he gave each color a meaning: blue was the spiritual and severe, yellow the gentle and cheerful, red the earthbound and heavy. He was trying to paint the world as an animal might feel it from the inside, not as a person looks at it from outside, and he built his animals from that code rather than from ordinary appearances. Here a cat has curled up to sleep. A tree in vivid blue rises straight up the middle of the picture and nearly cuts it in two, and the cat is half-tucked behind the trunk, settled in the one spot the composition seems built to hide it.