Nudes under Trees

Two women rest in a grove, their pink bodies lit against grass green and a sky of pure yellow. What may catch you first, though, are the trees. Franz Marc painted their slim trunks in blue, red, violet and yellow, letting them slice right across the figures like ribbons tossed over the scene. One woman stretches her arms behind her head, eyes closed; the other folds forward, her face half hidden. They do not look at each other, and they do not look at us.

Marc made this in 1911, the same year he and Wassily Kandinsky founded Der Blaue Reiter, the Munich group that pushed German art toward brighter colour and freer form. Marc had worked out a private code for colour: blue stood for the spiritual and masculine, yellow for the feminine and sensual, red for the earthly and heavy. Seen that way, the trees are not just scenery but a kind of argument running through the picture. Human figures were unusual for him, since he preferred horses, deer and cows, believing animals were purer than people. He was killed at Verdun in 1916, aged thirty six, which makes his handful of experimental years like this one feel particularly dense.