Stables

Somewhere in this tangle of color, horses are standing in a stable. The white one on the left is easiest to spot, its curved neck and pale flank bending into the shapes around it. Below it, a red horse lowers its head. The rest dissolve into the beams and posts of the barn, bodies cut into wedges of green, blue and orange that slide across each other like panes of colored glass. Franz Marc painted this in 1913, three years before he was killed at Verdun at the age of thirty six, and it belongs to the final stretch of his short career, when his animals began breaking apart into pure form.

Marc spent most of his life painting horses, deer and cattle because he thought animals were less corrupted than people, closer to something honest about the world. He also built a private language out of color: blue stood for the spiritual and masculine, yellow for warmth and gentleness, red for heavy, earthbound matter. A trip to Paris in 1912, where he saw the work of Robert Delaunay, pushed him toward this fractured, prismatic way of building a picture. He was a founder of the Blue Rider group alongside Wassily Kandinsky, and you can sense here how close he was getting to abstraction without quite letting the horses go. The painting now lives at the Guggenheim in New York.