The Tiger

A tiger has folded itself into a crouch, its head twisted back over one shoulder so the eyes meet yours directly. Everything about the animal is built from flat angular planes, as if the body had been assembled from shards of yellow glass, and the green and purple wedges of the surrounding jungle press in at the same hard angles. The effect is strange: the creature is both hidden in the landscape and made of the same material as it. The one part that stays soft is the face, where a bit of white fur and a dark, watchful eye remind you there is something alive in all those angles.

Franz Marc painted this in 1912, when he was deep into the ideas of Der Blaue Reiter, the Munich group he founded with Wassily Kandinsky. Marc was convinced that animals saw the world more honestly than people did, so he painted them again and again: horses, deer, foxes, cows. He also worked out a private code for color, in which blue stood for the spiritual and masculine, yellow for the sensual and feminine, red for heavy, brutal matter. A yellow tiger hemmed in by red and green, then, is not just a decorative choice. Marc had recently seen work by the Cubists and Italian Futurists in Paris and Munich, which explains the fractured geometry. He was killed at Verdun in 1916, at thirty-six, leaving a body of work that barely spans a decade. The painting hangs today in the Lenbachhaus in Munich.