Fighting Cows

Three cows have lowered their heads into a shoving match on a hillside, and each one is a different color: red on the left, deep blue in the middle, orange-yellow on the right. Franz Marc painted this in 1911, the same year he and Wassily Kandinsky launched the Blue Rider group in Munich. Marc had worked out a private code for color, which he explained in a letter to a friend. Blue stood for the masculine and the spiritual, yellow for something cheerful and sensual, and red for heavy, brutal matter that the other two had to struggle against. So this is not just a scuffle between farm animals. It is a clash of principles with hooves.

Whether or not you buy the theory, the painting works on simpler terms. The hills behind swell in bands of green and yellow, echoing the curved backs of the cows so the whole landscape seems to be leaning into the fight. Marc spent years drawing animals from life at the Berlin zoo and in the Bavarian countryside, and the anatomy here is accurate even when the color is wild. He believed animals saw the world more purely than people did, and he spent most of his short career painting them. He was killed at Verdun in 1916, aged thirty six, just a few years after finishing this.