Олени в монастырском саду

Franz Marc had trained for the priesthood before he turned to painting, and the old pull toward the sacred never quite left him. He came to believe animals saw the world more purely than people did, and he spent his last years painting them as if from inside their calm. Here a deer rests in a monastery garden, the title itself almost a prayer. But look at the garden. By 1912 Marc had been taking in the newest painting out of Paris and Italy, and the setting around the animal breaks into faceted, tilting planes, part Cubism and part Futurist motion. The creature is folded so tightly into it that shelter and threat begin to look the same. Marc believed a great upheaval was coming, one that would clear the way for a purer age. He was killed at Verdun in 1916, four years after this.