Blue Horse I

A young blue colt stands with its head bowed, mane flopping forward, hooves planted in a patch of red earth while the hills behind it swell in pink, purple, yellow and green. Franz Marc painted this in 1911, and the blue was no accident. He had worked out a private color code and shared it in a letter to his friend August Macke: blue stood for the spiritual and the masculine, yellow for warmth and cheerfulness, red for the heavy, physical world. So the horse is not just oddly colored. It is meant to carry a mood, set against a landscape of earthbound reds and sunny yellows.

Marc was obsessed with animals. He studied their anatomy closely, even taught animal drawing, and believed they had a purity and honesty that people had lost. That belief shaped the whole painting: the colt's lowered head reads as shy rather than sad, and its body curves to echo the rolling hills, as if animal and land were made of the same stuff. The work belongs to German Expressionism, and Marc was one of the artists behind Der Blaue Reiter, the Munich group he started with Wassily Kandinsky the same year. His career was short. He was drafted into the German army and killed at Verdun in 1916, aged thirty six, leaving a small body of work in which horses, deer and foxes glow in colors no one had used on them before.