Dog Lying in the Snow

That curled-up white shape is Russi, Franz Marc's own Siberian sheepdog, who followed him around the Bavarian countryside and turns up in several of his paintings. Marc has reduced the animal to a few broad planes of cream, yellow and green, so the dog almost dissolves into the snowbank beneath him. Only the dark muzzle, the closed eye and the strap of a collar tell you where the dog ends and the winter begins. Above, a few fir branches lean in from the top edge, and blue shadows pool across the snow like puddles of cold light.

Marc painted this around 1911, the year he and Wassily Kandinsky founded Der Blaue Reiter, the group that pushed German art toward bold color and simplified form. He had his own private code for color: blue stood for the spiritual and masculine, yellow for the warm and feminine, red for matter. More than that, he was convinced animals saw the world more honestly than people did, and he spent years trying to paint not just an animal's body but its way of experiencing a place. Here the experiment is modest and rather touching, a sleeping dog sunk into snow, belonging to it completely. Marc was killed at Verdun in 1916, aged thirty-six, with much of this project unfinished.