Cervo nel bosco II

Franz Marc painted this in the first months of 1914, when he still believed animals held a kind of innocence people had lost. He built the forest out of colliding planes of green, blue and red, folding the deer so deeply into the shapes around it that you have to search for the animal at all. Marc kept his own private code for colour, blue for the spiritual, yellow for a gentle joy, and he wanted the whole scene felt from somewhere inside the creature. Within a year the war he had half-welcomed as a cleansing force swept him up. He was called to the front, and in 1916 a shell splinter killed him near Verdun, at 36. This forest was among the last things he finished before he went.