Mandrill

Mandrill (1913) is an unusual subject within Franz Marc's animal repertoire, introducing an exotic primate rather than the European mammals — horses, cattle, deer, cats — that dominated his mature work. The mandrill's vivid facial colouring — blue and red — provided Marc with an animal subject whose natural appearance seemed already to embody his own colour symbolism, making it an especially compelling choice. The pencil medium described in the catalogue suggests this may be a drawing or study rather than a finished painting in the conventional sense, but the Lenbachhaus, which holds the work, treats it as a significant object in Marc's oeuvre. The mandrill's anthropoid quality — its closeness to human form — may have given Marc pause for thought about the boundary between animal and human that was so central to his philosophical framework: does the mandrill belong to the spiritual animal world or to the fallen human one? The 1913 date places it in his final major productive phase.

The pencil medium allows Marc to explore the mandrill's distinctive form through line and tonal variation. The drawing would reflect Marc's attention to the animal's specific physical character — the dramatic facial colouring that suggested his symbolic palette even in natural form.