Three Cats

Three Cats (1913) places Marc's feline subject within the fully mature Expressionist method of his final productive years. Unlike his earlier cat paintings from 1909, this work deploys the prismatic colour-plane language Marc developed through his encounter with Cubism and Delaunay's simultaneous colour theory. Three cats become vehicles for exploring the colour relationships between blue, yellow, and red — Marc's primary symbolic hues — in a compact compositional field. The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, one of Germany's major modern art collections, holds this work as part of its documentation of early German modernism. By 1913 Marc's Blaue Reiter group had run its course as an organised collective — Kandinsky had moved to Berlin, August Macke was deepening his own colour investigations — but Marc's individual productivity remained exceptionally high. His repeated return to cat subjects suggests genuine affection for the animal alongside its symbolic utility.

The three cat forms are constructed from colour planes in Marc's mature manner, their bodies merging and separating through colour relationship rather than outline. The symbolic primary colours are present and active.