The Sheep

Curled into the middle of this canvas, a sheep lowers its head and tucks its legs beneath it, its back arching into a pale green hump. Once you spot that one, others emerge: a second animal behind it, a white shape on the left, bodies that melt into hillsides and hillsides that curve like bodies. Franz Marc painted animals for most of his short career, not as portraits of particular creatures but as a way of getting at something he thought humans had lost. Here, around 1913, he was pushing that idea toward abstraction, letting the sheep dissolve into the crystalline planes of red, pink, blue and green that surround them. The jagged blue zigzag on the right has nothing to do with sheep at all, yet it feels right where it is.

Marc was a founder of Der Blaue Reiter, the Munich group that included Wassily Kandinsky, and he had his own private code for colour: blue stood for the spiritual and masculine, yellow for the feminine and mild, red for heavy earthly matter. Whether or not you buy the system, it explains why nothing here is painted the colour it would be in life. He was also absorbing ideas from the Futurists and from Robert Delaunay in Paris, which is why the landscape shatters into facets. His small "M" monogram sits in the lower right corner. Two or three years after finishing this, Marc was killed at Verdun at the age of thirty six, leaving a body of work that had just begun to go somewhere new.