Landschaft mit rotem Tier

'Landschaft mit rotem Tier' (Landscape with Red Animal) from 1913, in the Lenbachhaus in Munich, exemplifies the synthesis that Marc had achieved by this date between his animal subjects and landscape, his two primary motifs. In Marc's mature vision, animals are not observed naturalistic subjects but spiritual beings perfectly at home in a universe that — unlike human beings — they experience without alienation. The red animal (likely a deer, horse, or fox) in this landscape is presented not as an intrusion into natural space but as its natural expression, its redness following Marc's colour symbolism in a complex way: red was for Marc associated with violence and materiality, but it is deployed here in a more nuanced context of elemental embodiment. By 1913 Marc was developing what he called 'Animalisierung' — the animalisation of art — in which the landscape is perceived from within the animal rather than from the human viewpoint outside it. This was a deeply anti-anthropocentric vision at odds with most of Western art history and consistent with a spiritual ecology that sought to overcome the separation of human consciousness from the natural world. The Lenbachhaus holds the largest collection of Blaue Reiter works in the world, having acquired much of the group's output directly from the participants.

Oil on canvas with Marc's characteristic integration of animal and landscape into a unified surface of interlocking coloured planes. By 1913 his handling was moving toward greater fragmentation under the influence of Cubism and Italian Futurism, the animal and landscape forms beginning to interpenetrate and dissolve into each other.