Mountain goats

Mountain Goats (1913) demonstrates Franz Marc's extension of his animal-symbol vocabulary beyond the horses, cattle, and deer that were most central to his mature vision. Goats, with their association with alpine environments and the boundary between domestic and wild, offered Marc a different kind of animal subject — less obviously spiritual than the horse, perhaps more ambiguous in symbolic terms. By 1913 Marc was working with an almost architectural use of prismatic colour planes, influenced by his engagement with Cubism and Delaunay's Orphism, and the mountain goats provided a compositional challenge: animals of angular, dynamic form suited to the faceted, geometric language he had developed. The work dates from one of the most extraordinary periods in Marc's short career — he produced a remarkable body of work in the two years before his military service and death — and shows his animal subjects pushed to ever-greater levels of formal and chromatic intensity.

The goats are constructed from angular colour planes that echo both the animals' sharp-edged forms and the rocky mountain environment. Marc's palette is vivid and symbolic, using the interplay of contrasting hues to generate visual energy.