Lying bull

'Lying Bull' from 1913 at the Museum Folkwang in Essen belongs to Marc's sustained engagement with cattle as a symbolic subject. The bull in Western art carries associations with power, sacrifice, and elemental natural force going back to the cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux, and Marc was aware of this deep tradition. His bulls are typically painted in states of rest — lying, sleeping — which counterbalances the conventional associations of masculine power and aggression with a quality of elemental stillness and self-sufficiency. By 1913 Marc had seen the major Cubist exhibitions in Paris and was integrating Cubist fragmentation of form into his Expressionist colour approach, creating a synthesis visible in works like this — the bull's body may show the beginnings of the faceted, crystalline quality that would characterise his final works before his death at Verdun in 1916. The Museum Folkwang was one of the first major German museums to collect modern art, and its holdings of Blaue Reiter works reflect an early institutional recognition of the movement's significance. A lying bull is an animal at complete rest within its environment — for Marc this was an image of the spiritual harmony with nature that he believed animals possessed and humans had lost.

Oil on canvas with Marc's mature Expressionist-Cubist synthesis, the bull's body rendered through angular colour planes that suggest three-dimensional form while simultaneously acknowledging the flat surface. The palette employs Marc's chromatic symbolism, with the bull's colouration carrying its own expressive meaning within the composition.