| Artist: | Marc, Franz |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title of Work: | Fate of the Animals | |
| Date of Work: | 1913 | |
| Nationality: | German | |
| Context: | Pre-WWI | |
| Movement: | German Expressionism | |
| Medium: | Oil | |
| Subject: a key work for Marc that reveals an apocalyptic vision painted one year before the outbreak of war. The original title, "The Trees Show their Rings, the Animals their Veins," suggests his meta- physical desire to push "behind the veil of appearance" to the "other side" to seek "the hidden things in nature . . . the inner spiritual side of nature." Here he stresses this desire to see through nature by painting a mystical inner construction using a prismatic cubist fracturing to structure this scene of primal chaos. It is a world being torn apart as fires rain down from heaven and trees are pulled out from the earth. Animals shriek in terror, running to escape the inescapable. The most poignant moment is at center where the blue deer throws its head back in one final scream while the red ray of light cuts through the white of the deer's neck. In this massacre of the innocents, we get a kind of crucifixion scene that expresses an apocalypptic end of the world. On the reverse side of the canvas, the artist had written this inscription: ""And All Being is Flaming Suffering." The "Fate of the Animals" would actually become the fate of the canvas itself, which caught on fire later, after Marc's death. In a painting in which the theme of destruction is so explicit, it is ironic that the canvas itself would almost be destroyed by fire. Marc's friend, the painter Paul Klee, undertook the task of restoring the work; he resurrected the linear structure of the original in the damaged portion on the right, but he chose not to attempt to duplicate the unique transparency of colors that were Marc's alone. The result is an image of apocalypse and a plea for redemption. Style: his earlier art from 1910-12 showed the mixed influence of Art Nouveau flowing rhythms and organic curves with Fauvist color to simulate an animal's consciousness; in 1913-14, a Cubist influence enters his work. Marc would develop his own unique form of Cubist fracture, however. Instead of breaking up his subject, Marc uses Cubism more as a way to fuse than fragment his forms into an allover structure that stresses union rather than alienation and separation; Cubism becomes his way to get at that "mystical inner construction" that underlies all nature. For him, Cubism is a form of linkage, not deconstruction. Marc's Cubism is a color prism, a kaleidoscope that fuses more than it fragments. Context: Germany in the years leading up to WWI where "joie de vivre" (joy of life) was not the atmosphere. In his desire to make art metaphysical by identifying with an animal's consciousness, Marc expresses the growing spiritual crisis of Germany, which moved abruptly from an agricultural society (close to nature) to a technological society (factories and German efficiency) due to the Industrial Revolution. German Expressionist artists picked up on the apocalypse to come in the tense years leading up to war (1910-1914); the theme that they continually express or try to overcome is angst: an alienated anxiety. What they want to do is give visual form to inner life; they are, thus, against Mimesis. The art is highly subjective and they do not hesitate to exaggerate in order to express felt reality. It is an art born out of inner necessity. There are two groups of German Expressionists: Die Brucke (the bridge) and Der Blaue Rieter (the Blue Rider). Marc belongs to Der Blaue Reiter, which is an art that stresses intuition and a metaphysical projection into the mysterious realm of nature through color and forms that push away from description and towards the abstract. The movement is more lyrical and romantic than the sharpened tensions and jagged edges of Die Brucke. Marc's visionary images push towards an "apocalyptic enthusiasm" in the years preceding the war (1912-14); along with other contemporaries, like the writer Herman Hesse, this generation almost longed for the apocalpse to come as the only way to purge what they saw as a soulless, materialistic, hopelessly bourgeois and corrupt society. Marc fights on the front during the war, at which time his art pushes close to the point of complete abstraction, non-objectivity. He never lived to make that final metaphysical breakthrough; he was killed at the front in 1916. | ||
