Os lobos (Guerra dos Bálcãs)

The Balkan League attacked the Ottoman Empire in October 1912, and by the summer of 1913 the winners were fighting one another over the spoils. Munich newspapers carried it for months. Marc had built his work on animals, painted as creatures still at home in the world in a way people no longer were, and here he turned them to something else. Wolves close in from the right across a canvas nearly a metre and a half wide and only 70 centimetres high, the shape of a strip of map. The Buffalo museum that bought it in 1951 describes green flames burning in the foreground, purple smoke in the distance, and pink flowers wilting between them. Marc volunteered for the German army in 1914 and was killed by a shell splinter near Verdun in March 1916, at 36.