About this work
The first encounter with *The Mandrill* is not with an animal — it's with colour. In the incandescence of colours, one at first sees a geometric structure that resembles a puzzle, with its agglomeration of prisms, cones, strongly coloured semi-circles and other derivative mixed forms.
Two diagonals open up a suggestion of depth, though the chromatic values of the colours push forward in a flattening effect; upon closer inspection, the viewer eventually discovers the animal in the centre of the composition.
The powerful ape is composed of all the colours in the chromatic spectrum, seeming to wilfully distinguish itself from the surrounding forms — one can make out a head with a long snout and a mop of hair, and moving downward, two arching arms terminating in hands that grip objects as the mandrill makes its way through its environment.
The composition is a tapestry of intertwining forms and planes, capturing the essence of the mandrill through intense shades of green, blue, yellow, and red.
*The Mandrill* is an oil painting completed in 1913 , one of the most turbulent and productive years of Marc's career — the same year he produced *The Tower of Blue Horses*, *The Foxes*, and *Fate of the Animals*. Art historians believe Marc had seen the latest works of Robert Delaunay on display in Berlin that year and had been affected by that artist's evolution — specifically, in Delaunay's *Sun and Moon*, circular forms interpenetrate with intensely contrasting colours, and that same distribution of "cold" and "hot" colours carries into *The Mandrill*.
What the painting reveals is Marc's immersion in the exciting new world of abstraction — yet, whereas other artists of the early twentieth century concentrated on purely abstract and non-representational forms, Marc embraced abstraction while continuing with his animal motifs. The choice of a mandrill — a creature whose own face is a riot of vivid, almost implausible colour — is no accident: the mandrill, with its expressive face and bright colours, symbolises the strength and complexity of animal life that, in Marc's vision, contrasts the coldness and rationality of modern man. The painting now resides in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen — the Bavarian State Painting Collections — in Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne.
On the wall, *The Mandrill* functions as a painting that rewards time. The simplified shapes and bold lines convey the essence of the animal rather than a realistic depiction — an abstraction that allows viewers to engage on a more emotional level. It belongs in a space that can absorb its intensity without competing with it: a white-walled study, a room with natural north
