The Yellow Cow

A cow is caught mid leap, all four legs off the ground, its yellow body curving like a bounding dog rather than a heavy farm animal. Franz Marc painted it in 1911, the same year he married Maria Franck and the same year he and Wassily Kandinsky founded the Blue Rider, a loose circle of German artists who wanted color to carry feeling rather than copy nature. Marc had worked out his own system for this: blue stood for the spiritual and the masculine, red for heavy earthly matter, and yellow for warmth, cheer, and the feminine. So many people read this leaping cow as a sort of portrait of his new wife, with the blue mountains in the background standing in for Marc himself.

Whether or not the romantic reading holds, the painting makes its case through sheer energy. Jagged blue peaks, orange slopes, and a bank of pink and red boulders tilt around the animal, and nothing sits still. Marc was a lifelong animal lover who believed beasts saw the world more purely than people did, and he spent years drawing them in fields near his home in Bavaria before he let his colors run free like this. He was killed at Verdun in 1916 at thirty six, which makes the handful of years that produced work like this feel very short indeed.