Three Horses

Three horses stand with their heads lowered, their bodies curving into the landscape around them as if they were part of the hills. The red one in front, the grey in the middle, the burnt orange behind: each animal is built from the same sweeping arcs that shape the rocks, trees and sky. Franz Marc painted this around 1912 in watercolor and gouache, and the whole scene seems to be mid-tilt, with wedges of green, pink and blue pressing in from every side. The influence of Cubism and Futurism is clear in those fractured planes, though Marc used them to bind his animals to the world rather than break them apart.

Marc was a founder of Der Blaue Reiter, the Munich circle he started with Wassily Kandinsky, and he had firm ideas about what colors meant. Blue stood for the spiritual and masculine, yellow for warmth and joy, red for the heavy, physical stuff of the earth. He painted animals almost exclusively in his short career because he thought they saw the world more truthfully than people did. The horses here are not portraits of particular animals so much as attempts to show how a horse might feel inside its own landscape. Marc was killed at Verdun in 1916, aged thirty-six, and decades later the Nazis pulled his work from German museums and labeled it degenerate.