Yellow Cow

Franz Marc was a founder of Der Blaue Reiter - the Blue Rider - a group of German Expressionist painters working in Munich around 1911.

Expressionism, broadly, was a reaction against Impressionism - while both broke radically from the academic tradition, the Impressionists sought to represent light and atmosphere, while the Expressionists wanted to use colour and form to express inner states : emotion, anxiety, joy...

Marc's fellow Blue Rider, Wassily Kandinsky, is also in this collection - and was moving toward full abstraction at the very same moment.

The Blue Rider had its own colour theory.

Yellow was feminine and joyful.

Blue was spiritual and masculine.

Red was violence and matter.

Marc believed that animals were purer and more spiritual than humans - uncorrupted by modern life, closer to some essential truth.

He painted them constantly, in colours that had nothing to do with nature : yellow cows, blue horses, red deer...

This cow - yellow, exuberant, leaping and taking up most of the painting - is one of his most joyful works.

'Fun fact': Marc was killed, age 35, at the Battle of Verdun.

He had been placed on a list of artists to be recalled from the front - but the order arrived two days after his death.