The Long Yellow Horse

A horse stretches across almost the whole canvas, its body a long slab of yellow that looks more sculpted than drawn. It stands with its head lowered and turned away, mane and tail falling in dark strokes, while behind it a rainbow curves over pink and blue mountains, red barn walls lean at odd angles, and a blue tree sprouts in the middle of everything. Nothing lines up the way it would in life. The stairs below the horse seem to lead nowhere in particular, and the sky is striped like fabric. The painter signed it with a small blue "M" in the lower right corner.

Franz Marc made animals the center of nearly all his work, and he had a whole theory behind his colors. Blue, for him, was serious and spiritual. Red stood for heavy, earthly matter. Yellow was warm, cheerful, and feminine. So this long yellow body set against red buildings is not a random choice but a kind of coded feeling, closer to music than to a portrait of a real animal. Marc helped start the Blue Rider group in Munich with Wassily Kandinsky, and the two pushed each other toward exactly this sort of bold, unreal color. His career was brief. He was drafted in 1914 and killed at Verdun in 1916, at thirty six, leaving behind a body of work built almost entirely around horses, deer, and foxes.