Javalis Selvagens

Marc painted these two boars in 1913, the last full year of peace before Europe went to war. He had almost stopped painting people. Animals, he believed, still lived honestly inside nature in a way humans no longer did, and he built a private code of colour to say so, blue for the spiritual and male, yellow for the gentle and female, red for the weight and violence of matter. Here a boar and a sow curl down into the reds and blues of the ground until you can hardly tell where the animals stop and the hillside begins. It is a picture of two creatures completely at home in the world. When the war came the following year Marc volunteered at once. He was killed near Verdun in 1916, 36 years old.