The White Cat

The White Cat (1912) is among Franz Marc's most unusual animal paintings, notable for the choice of pure white as the defining colour of the subject in a body of work strongly associated with vivid, symbolically loaded hues. White in Marc's system held complex associations — potentially spiritual transcendence or innocence, operating differently from the primary symbolic hues he assigned to most subjects. The painting is now in the Moritzburg, the castle-museum complex near Halle. The 1912 date places it at the heart of his mature Expressionist period, when his handling of colour and form had reached a confident synthesis. The relative simplicity of a white cat on a coloured ground gave Marc the opportunity to explore the expressive potential of tonal contrast within a chromatic field — a different kind of colour problem from his usual symbolic assignments, and evidence of his range within the system he had built.

The white cat presents a different compositional challenge from Marc's colour-saturated animal subjects. He constructs the figure through tonal and colour contrast with the surrounding field, the white form taking its character from what surrounds it.