Drei Tiere

In this painting, Franz Marc places dog, cat, and fox next to each other, irrespective of their natural enmity, and yet the animals appear neither nervous nor agitated. While the fox sleeps peacefully in the background, the cat and the dog seem undisturbed by each other’s presence.

Marc depicts a pacified and harmonious world, which has more in common with a paradisiacal utopia than with reality. In his characteristic painting style, he dissects the animal bodies into geometrical forms, while the intensive color tones generate rich contrasts. Through his dissection of the remaining pictorial space in the same fashion, his animals appear to be embedded in nature—the Expressionist painting thus depicts a state of natural unity devoid of conflict and discord.

For Marc, a founding member of the Blue Rider group, animals were symbols of the natural and pure and assumed a central role in his Expressionist paintings.