Dois Cavalos, Vermelho e Azul

Marc had written down what his colours meant before he painted horses this way. In a letter to his friend the painter August Macke at the end of 1910 he gave each one a job. Blue was the male principle, severe and spiritual. Yellow was the female principle, gentle and cheerful. Red was matter, heavy and brutal, the thing the other two have to contend with. So a red horse standing with a blue one sets two opposed forces of his own system side by side. He kept returning to animals because of a question he had put to himself around the same time, about how the world might be reflected in the eye of the creature standing in it. He was working in Sindelsdorf, the Bavarian village where he lived, and in April 1913 he posted Kandinsky in Munich a painted card of a red and a blue horse.