Courtesy of www.FranzMarc.org

In autumn 1912 Marc and Macke visited Robert Delaunay in Paris. This meeting and the confrontation with the intellectual foundations of French Cubism proved to be of immense importance for both. The principle of the transitory condition of all living things and their interpenetration, the simultaneity and inseparability of spirit and matter, is reflected in pictures such as In the Rain (1912), and one of Marc's major works, The Tiger (1912). In this work the figure of the dangerous, cunning animal appears crouching and yet ready to spring in the midst of formal structures whose crystalline construction corresponds to that of the physical presence of the animal. No dualism of any sort between animate and inanimate nature is shown. The indivisibility of all being was the essential spiritual message.