Landscape with Animals

Landscape with Animals (1913), in the Saint Louis Art Museum, is characteristic of Franz Marc's tendency in his final productive years to place animals within compositionally unified landscapes where figure and environment share the same prismatic colour treatment. The Saint Louis Art Museum has a significant collection of European modernism, and this work represents German Expressionism within that context. By 1913 Marc was producing works in which the conceptual distinction between 'animal painting' and 'landscape painting' was becoming meaningless — the animals were inseparable from their colour environments, and the landscapes were animated by animal presence in a way that made each define the other. The philosophical underpinning of this formal approach was Marc's conviction that the division between creature and world was itself a symptom of fallen human consciousness: in the truly spiritual vision he sought, all creation would be experienced as continuous.

The 1913 canvas fully deploys Marc's mature method, with animals and landscape treated through the same prismatic colour-plane vocabulary. The composition creates visual unity through colour consistency and the integration of animal forms into the landscape's colour field.