Cattle

'Cattle' from 1913 at Museum Ludwig in Cologne places Marc's most sustained animal subject — cattle, which he returned to throughout his career — within his mature Expressionist-Cubist synthesis. By 1913 Marc had seen the major Cubist works in Paris and the Italian Futurist exhibition in Germany, and was integrating their structural approaches into his spiritually motivated colour painting. Cattle had special meaning for Marc: they were humble working animals, associated with the German countryside where he lived, but also creatures of ancient symbolic significance — the ox appears in Christian nativity imagery, in the Egyptian worship of Apis, in the prehistoric cave paintings of Altamira. This depth of cultural and spiritual resonance made cattle apt subjects for Marc's project of finding the divine within the animal. The paperboard support may indicate this was a smaller, more experimental work rather than a major exhibition canvas — Marc worked prolifically across a range of scales and supports, using informal materials for studies and experimental pieces. Museum Ludwig's twentieth-century German collection provides an important institutional context for this work.

On paperboard, a more experimental or intimate support than canvas, suggesting a work made with greater freedom than Marc's major exhibition paintings. The painting likely employs his characteristic interlocking colour planes with cattle forms dissolving into landscape, the whole surface unified through a bold, systematic colour arrangement that draws on both Expressionist and Cubist approaches to pictorial organisation.