Animals in a Landscape

Animals in a Landscape (1914) is one of Franz Marc's last major paintings completed before his enlistment in the German army and his death at Verdun in 1916. By 1914 Marc's work had reached a point of near-abstraction — the animal subjects that had always been his primary vehicles of spiritual meaning were becoming increasingly dissolved into the surrounding colour fields, their identities suggested rather than described. This trajectory toward pure abstraction, which Marc discussed in correspondence with Kandinsky and others, was cut short by the war. The Detroit Institute of Arts holds this late work, which shows Marc grappling with the tension between residual representation and the impulse toward a completely colour-and-form-based art divorced from natural appearances. The animals — horses, cattle, or deer depending on reading — move through a landscape that has become a field of intersecting colour planes, the boundary between figure and ground increasingly permeable.

The 1914 canvas pushes Marc's colour-plane method toward its logical limit. Animal forms are suggested by colour and compositional placement rather than drawn outline, merged with the landscape to a degree that approaches non-figurative painting.