Yellow Cow

The antic joie de vivre of the Yellow Cow is the first and perhaps the only case of a joyous animal in Marc's career. It is totally abandoned to play. Marc avoids the typically human, sentimental view of animals. Rather, the cow has surrendered to its nature, as it were. It gestures in a mime language, like those poses in Hodler, which also speak of metaphysical states. This animal emotion perfectly evoked the concept proposed by Kandinsky called "inner necessity," by which is meant the essence of feeling determined by whatever physical and cultural circumstances pertain. A unity between the cow and nature is indicated coloristically by the repetition of the animal's yellow cast just to the right of the head, the white of the udder in area below, and the blue spots in the mountains beyond. Franz Marc believed that animals possessed a certain godliness that men had long since lost. "People with their lack of piety, especially men, never touched my true feelings," he wrote in 1915. "But animals with their virginal sense of life awakened all that was good in me."