Blue Horse I

A single blue horse stands with bowed head amid a landscape of rounded, undulating hills in red, yellow, and green. Franz Marc, a founder of the German Blue Rider group, assigned animals symbolic colors - blue for the spiritual and masculine - and sought through them a purer, more innocent vision of nature than the corrupt human world allowed. Now in Munich's Lenbachhaus, Blue Horse I is among his signature works - the animal rendered not naturalistically but as an emblem of spiritual harmony, color and creature fused into a tender, mystical image of the natural world.