Yellow Cow

A yellow cow leaps and kicks joyously across a landscape of bright colored hills, its body curving with exuberant energy. Franz Marc, who gave animals symbolic colors, used yellow for the gentle, feminine, and joyful, and the bounding creature radiates pure happiness and vitality. Now in the Guggenheim, the Yellow Cow is among his most exuberant works - the animal not observed but celebrated, an emblem of natural delight rendered in the glowing, expressive color of German Expressionism. Marc, like his Blue Rider companions, sought in such beasts an innocence and spiritual wholeness beyond the human.