The Large Blue Horses occupies a special place in the Walker Art Center's history as the first major modernist work to enter the collection. The painting was purchased in 1942 and marks a shift in the museum's collecting practices toward the contemporary and modern.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Franz Marc was part of an avant-garde circle of Russian and German painters known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). With fellow members Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke, and others, Marc explored the psychological effects of color and line in daring abstract compositions. Marc used abstract color (a brilliant blue) and line (the curving of the horses' necks) to communicate the animals' spiritual harmony with nature.

Like Ritual, another early Rothko in the Walker collection, untitled illustrates strong visual connections between European Surrealism and the beginnings of Abstract Expressionism in the United States. Through the use of a Surrealist technique called psychic automatism—a kind of doodling where the artist lets impulse lead the way—Rothko created a field of freely floating geometric shapes and disconnected forms. This work precedes the Color Field paintings for which Rothko is most well known.

Look closely to get a feel for the kind of marks that Rothko made using psychic automatism. To do so in ArtsConnectEd, activate the zoom tool by hovering your cursor over the image and clicking on the "+" symbol that appears. Examine the artwork's surface and the varied lines and shapes made with watercolor, tempera, ink, and graphite.