Two Cats, Blue and Yellow

Looking at Two Cats, Blue and Yellow

A large blue cat curls beside a smaller yellow one. Their bodies are simplified, yet the contrast of size and colour makes their companionship easy to recognise. Franz Marc painted Two Cats, Blue and Yellow (Zwei Katzen, blau und gelb) in 1912. The oil canvas, 74.1 × 98.2 cm, belongs to the Kunstmuseum Basel. It is a different work from Marc’s later Three Cats and from the single White Cat of 1912. ^[1]

Watch: Franz Marc

Explore Marc’s blue horses, the Blue Rider circle and the move towards abstraction in English-language videos.

Franz Marc, Blue Horses and Der Blaue Reiter

The Canvas

An English-language introduction to Marc’s blue horses, animals, spirituality and the Blue Rider.

Watch on YouTube

▶01 · Marc and his horsesFranz Marc, Blue Horses and Der Blaue ReiterThe Canvas▶02 · The Blue RiderWho were the Blue Rider?Tate▶03 · Towards abstractionThe Case for AbstractionThe Art Assignment · PBS Digital Studios

A paired composition

The cats’ shapes answer one another. The larger body makes a broad blue curve, while the smaller yellow cat supplies a concentrated warm shape nearby. Their outlines are not anatomical diagrams: Marc uses the relation of curved backs, tucked heads and contrasting colour to hold the composition together. The painting invites a viewer to move between the two animals rather than isolate a colour and assign it a single meaning. His 1910 letter to August Macke shows he thought in symbolic colour relationships, but it is the specific balance of this canvas that makes the pair work. ^{[1] [2]}

Exchanges, confiscation and Basel

The museum’s provenance begins with Alexej Jawlensky, who held the painting in 1913–14 after exchanging one of his own works with Marc. It later passed through Galerie Goltz, Rudolf Ibach and the Kunstverein Wuppertal-Barmen, which received it as a gift in 1927. Nazi authorities confiscated it on 5 July 1937 as “degenerate” art. It appeared in the regime’s Munich exhibition, then in the Galerie Fischer auction at Lucerne on 30 June 1939. Kunstmuseum Basel bought it at that sale with public credit, and its inventory is 1746. These steps explain how a private artist exchange became part of a Swiss museum collection. ^[1]

The museum also records a protest by German officers against the vilification of Marc, who had died in military service, during the 1937 exhibition. That intervention affected the display of Marc’s paintings but did not undo the confiscation of this one. The cats’ quiet closeness and the work’s turbulent ownership history are separate facts; neither should be turned into a simple allegory for the other. ^[1]