Animals in a Landscape

Shapes of grazing creatures merge with jagged, angular fields of color across this canvas, their outlines dissolving into red, yellow, green, and blue planes that seem to push and fold against one another. Livestock figures emerge and recede within a landscape built less from scenery than from pure geometric rhythm. Franz Marc painted this oil on canvas in 1914, and it is held today at the Detroit Institute of Arts, having come to the museum as a gift from Robert H. Tannahill. Marc worked within Expressionism, and his paintings of animals, including a well known piece called Blue Horse I, reflect his interest in color as a carrier of feeling. One detail worth noticing is how the overlapping forms create a sense of movement, as though the animals and the land around them are caught mid-transformation, bending into triangles and arcs of saturated color.