The Foxes
Franz Marc, 1913
The Foxes is a 1913 oil on canvas by the German Expressionist painter Franz Marc, in which he moved notably close to abstraction. At first glance the picture seems to be a arrangement of angular planes and fragments of colour; only on a second look can one make out two red foxes, one with its head lowered in the foreground and another, partly hidden, behind it with its tail drooping. Horizontal, diagonal and vertical lines cross in a Cubist manner, creating a sense of movement. The composition recalls a broken stained-glass window, an allusion to medieval church windows. Marc had visited Robert Delaunay in Paris in 1912, and the colour and rhythm of Delaunay's Orphic Cubism, along with the fragmented forms of the Italian Futurists, shaped this work. Compared with his more figurative Blue Fox of 1911, the animal forms here nearly dissolve into geometric structure. The painting has a turbulent history: it belonged to the Jewish collector Kurt Grawi, who was persecuted under the Nazi regime, and it entered the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf in 1962. After a long dispute over its restitution, it was returned to Grawi's heirs in 2022 and sold at auction.
- Painter
- Franz Marc
- Date
- 1913
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 88 × 66 cm
- Museum
- Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf
- Genre
- animal art
- Depicts
- fox
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