Deer in a Monastery Garden

Somewhere in the middle of this kaleidoscope, a white deer is lying down. Once you spot the small head and the long neck curving toward the lower right, the rest of the picture starts to organize itself around the animal: green wedges become hedges or trees, pink and red slabs become garden walls, and a pale crescent in the upper left hangs like a moon over the whole scene. Franz Marc painted it in 1912, and the title tells us we are in a monastery garden, a walled place of shelter, which is exactly the sort of refuge he liked to imagine for his animals.

Marc belonged to Der Blaue Reiter, the Munich circle he founded with Wassily Kandinsky, and he had just seen the work of Robert Delaunay and the Italian Futurists in Paris. That encounter shows here in the way light splinters into overlapping planes of color. Marc also gave colors fixed meanings in his own private system: blue stood for the spiritual and masculine, yellow for the feminine and cheerful, red for heavy, earthbound matter. Whether or not you buy the theory, it explains why the deer is painted almost colorless, a still white shape at the center of all that activity. Marc believed animals saw the world more truly than people did. He was killed at Verdun four years after finishing this painting, at thirty six.