虎

Franz Marc painted this tiger in March 1912, months after he and Kandinsky had launched the Blue Rider group in Munich, and just as Cubism and Italian Futurism were reaching Germany. You can watch him working it out: the animal and the rocks around it break into hard crystalline facets, so that the yellow body and the landscape lock together like shards of the same stone. Marc believed animals saw the world more purely than people did, and he spent these years painting almost nothing else, trying to get inside that gaze. The tiger is coiled, half-hidden, watching something to the side. Four years after this, Marc was dead at Verdun, one of countless artists of his generation the war took at 36.