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Franz Marc painted this in the spring of 1914, in a house near Kochel am See in Bavaria that he and his wife Maria had moved into only weeks before. It is one of his last paintings and his most abstract, the recognisable animals almost gone, leaving two whirling forms, a compact dark-blue mass on one side and a spreading red one branching toward it. He gave it the name Fighting Forms himself, in a letter to Maria. That August the war began. Marc volunteered, and in 1916 he was killed by a shell at Verdun, aged 36. Bavaria bought the canvas in 1949. Whatever he meant by the struggle of red against blue, he never explained it beyond the title.