  About the Artwork
  
  
  In this painting, the bodies of bovine animals –– at least three of them, grazing the grass in the foreground and lying asleep in the distance –– merge with the surrounding landscape composed of intensely colored prismatic shapes. The red, blue, and yellow forms burst from their point of origin in the upper right corner with the explosive energy that unites the animals, terrain, and plants in harmony.
Franz Marc rejected the dominance of rationalism and materialism that came with a rapid modernisation of Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. Instead, he turned to nature as a source of the spiritual power and made animals a main motif of his painting. Marc depicted animals in strong hues, according to his belief in symbolic correspondences between individual colors and specific spiritual states, understood by him in a gendered way. For Marc, red connoted the brutal power of primal material forces; blue was spiritual and masculine; and yellow was sensual and feminine.
  
  
  Title
  Animals in a Landscape
  
  
  Artwork Date
  1914
  
  Artist
  Franz Marc
  
  
  
  Life Dates
  1880-1916
  
  
  
  
  Nationality
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Definitions for nationality may vary significantly, depending on chronology and world events.
  Some definitions include:
  Belonging to a people having a common origin based on a geography and/or descent and/or tradition and/or culture and/or religion and/or language, or sharing membership in a legally defined nation.
  
  
  
  German
  
  
  
  Culture
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Cultures may be defined by the language, customs, religious beliefs, social norms, and material traits of a group.
  
  
  
  
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  Medium
  Oil on canvas
  
  
  Dimensions
  Unframed: 43 3/8 × 39 1/4 inches (110.2 × 99.7 cm)
  Framed: 46 7/8 × 43 × 2 1/4 inches (119.1 × 109.2 × 5.7 cm)
  
  
  Classification
  Paintings
  
  
  Department
  European Modern Art to 1970
  
  
  Credit
  Gift of Robert H. Tannahill
  
  
  
  Accession Number
  
  
  
  This unique number is assigned to an individual artwork as part of the cataloguing process at the time of entry into the permanent collection.
  Most frequently, accession numbers begin with the year in which the artwork entered the museum’s holdings.
  For example, 2008.3 refers to the year of acquisition and notes that it was the 3rd of that year. The DIA has a few additional systems—no longer assigned—that identify specific donors or museum patronage groups.
  
  
  
  56.144
  
  
  Copyright
  Copyright Not Evaluated
