The Foxes

Somewhere in this storm of red splinters, two foxes are curled up together. Find the pointed snout near the top center, the dark eye, the ear angled back, and the shape falls into place: one animal resting, another tucked below it with its muzzle pointing right. Franz Marc painted this in 1913, borrowing the broken planes of Cubism and the speed lines of Futurism, but using them for his own purpose. He wanted to show animals from the inside out, as creatures woven into the forest rather than posed in front of it. Color carried meaning for him too. Red stood for matter, heavy and earthbound, while the blues and greens pressing in from the edges stood for something more spiritual.

Marc was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter, the Munich group that pushed German art toward pure color and feeling. He had only three more years to work. He was killed at Verdun in 1916, aged thirty six, after the German army had already placed him on a list of artists to be pulled from the front line. The notice arrived too late. The painting itself had a difficult century as well. It belonged to Kurt Grawi, a Jewish businessman who was imprisoned after Kristallnacht and sold the work from exile in Chile. In 2021, after a long dispute, the city of Düsseldorf returned it to his heirs, and it became the most expensive Marc ever sold.