ARTWAY:
OPENING EYES,
HEARTS & MINDS
Follow Us
Artists
Marc, Franz - VM - Kick Bras
Franz Marc: Fate of the Animals
The Spiritual Significance of Animals in Franz Marc’s Visual Art
by Kick Bras
This painting titled Fate of the Animals (Tierschicksale), also known as The Trees Showed Their Rings, the Animals Their Veins, from 1913 by the German painter Franz Marc, shows how man is destroying the habitat of animals in the wilderness. A paradisal animal world is disrupted by an apocalyptic disaster. The lack of horizontal and vertical lines makes the image very restless. The large diagonal lines of snapped and uprooted trees evoke an atmosphere of chaos and enormous threat. The panicked horses under a bleeding tree at the top left, boars seeking shelter at the bottom left, and the group of deer with stretched necks on the right make the fear tangible. The elongated neck of the animal that screams to heaven in agony does not leave us unmoved. It's not just a natural disaster at work here. It is also about a catastrophe caused by human beings. We see a sawn-off tree trunk on the left. Clearly, man has been at work here.
When Marc served at the front in 1915, he received a postcard of this work which was being exhibited in Berlin at the time. He wrote to his wife on March 17, 1915: "I was very upset and agitated. It seems like a prediction of this war, horrific and moving. I can hardly believe I painted this. On the blurry postcard the effect is so incredibly true that it is gruesome.”
The German painter Franz Marc lived from 1880-1916. During his high school years he considered studying theology. At that time he was very much under the influence of the Lutheran preacher Otto Schlier. But he chose to become an artist and started to focus more and more on painting animals. At the time he was stimulated by the animal painter Jean Bloe Niestle, who advised him to delve into the animal soul.
Marc was looking for a way of painting that gives expression to inner emotions and spiritual vision. He wrote: “There is a voice inside me that tells me again and again: back to nature, back to the simplest things. For it is only in this that there is the symbolism, pathos and mystery of nature.”
He wanted his work to become less naturalistic and more spiritual. To this end he began to make the forms more abstract and simpler. When he painted animals, he was no longer concerned with an exact representation of the animal. He rather wanted to penetrate to the essence of the animal, to the beating and pounding life in the animal. He wanted to evoke the mystery of life that he discerned in animals. For example, around 1912 he wrote:
There is no true art without religion. Science and technology cannot replace this. New symbols will emerge to connect God and art. Art will free itself from people's wishes and plans. We will no longer paint the forest and the horse as we like them, but as they really are, as the forest and the horse feel themselves, their deepest being, which lies behind the outward appearance.
According to Marc you can see the trembling of life, the beating of the blood, in animals. You see how the same mystery of life of which man is part, also lives in animals and plants. We need to empathize with the way in which life in animals manifests itself.
From 1908 he spent three years painting compositions with horses. He shaped the landscape more and more in accordance with the rhythm formed by the different horses’ bodies, so that a symbiosis was created. Colours also started to play a role in this. The use of complementary colours was supposed to bring balance to the painting. Together with Kandinsky (among others) he published an almanac under the title Der blaue Reiter and founded a new group of artists with the same name. According to Marc the new art they wanted to make did have a tradition behind it, for example in the mystical work of El Greco. He is aiming at a mystical-inner construction of the world. His group’s goal is to “create symbols of their time with work that belongs on the altar of the future spiritual religion.”
Together with the artists’ group die Brücke, the group of der Blaue Reiter became a high-profile and influential movement of German expressionism. This movement wanted to break with the old order of the German Empire with its hypocritical morality, its penchant for ostentation, its extreme capitalism and materialism, and its art of nationalistic glorification. The art that the expressionists wanted to make had to be pure, intuitive, vitalistic, not naturalistic but spiritual and idealistic. Unfortunately, he was not given much time. At the outbreak of the First World War, he was drafted into the army and was killed at the front in France on 4 March 1916.
*******
Franz Marc: Fate of the Animals (Tierschicksale), 1913, oil on canvas, 264 x 195 cm. Basel, Kunstmuseum.
Franz Marc (1880-1916) was born in Munich, Germany. The son of a landscape painter, he decided to become an artist after a year of military service interrupted his plans to study philology. He also seriously considered studying theology. From 1900 to 1902 he studied at the Kunstakademie in Munich with Gabriel Hackl and Wilhelm von Diez. The following year, during a visit to France, he was introduced to Japanese woodcuts and the work of the Impressionists in Paris. Marc suffered from severe depression from 1904 to 1907. In 1907 he went again to Paris, where he responded enthusiastically to the work of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, the Cubists, and the Expressionists. In 1910 Marc’s first solo show was held at Kunsthandlung Brackl, Munich; and he met August Macke and the collector Bernhard Koehler. He publicly defended the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM) and was formally welcomed into the group early in 1911, when he met Vasily Kandinsky. After internal dissension split the NKVM, he and Kandinsky formed Der Blaue Reiter, whose first exhibition took place in December 1911 in Munich. Marc invited members of the Berlin Brücke group to participate in the second Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) show two months later. Der Blaue Reiter Almanac was published with lead articles by Marc in 1912. When World War I broke out in August 1914 Marc immediately enlisted. He died on March 4, 1916, in Braquis, near Verdun-sur-Meuse, France.
Kick Bras (1949) is a theologian who publishes on spirituality, mysticism, and meditation. As a researcher, he is affiliated with the Titus Brandsma Institute in Nijmegen, a scientific research institute for the study of spirituality in the light of the Jewish and Christian tradition. Previously, he taught spirituality at the (Protestant) Theological University of Kampen. He published four books in Dutch about mysticism, and spirituality and art. See more: http://www.kickbras.nl.
ArtWay Visual Meditation 21 July 2024