The Dream

A woman sits cross-legged with her eyes closed, and around her the world keeps moving without her: two blue horses nose the grass, a lion opens its mouth in a roar, a red-brown deer picks its way past a yellow house with a red roof. Nothing touches her. Franz Marc painted this in 1912, and the title tells you how to read it. The animals are not neighbors but visitors from inside her head, each one drifting in on its own patch of color.

Marc was a founder of Der Blaue Reiter, the circle of German Expressionist artists he started with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich, and he had worked out a private language for color: blue stood for the spiritual and the masculine, yellow for warmth and the feminine, red for heavy, earthbound matter. Knowing that, the blue horses and the yellow lion start to feel less like scenery and more like opposing forces circling the sleeper. Marc almost never painted people, believing animals were less corrupted than humans and better suited to express what he wanted. That makes this painting unusual in his work, and it clearly meant something to his friends too: Kandinsky kept it, and it hung in his home for years. Marc was killed at Verdun in 1916, aged thirty-six, only four years after finishing it.