Animal fates

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Animal fates (Franz Marc)
Animal fates
Franz Marc , 1913
Oil on canvas
195 x 263.5 cm
Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel

Tierschicksale is the title of a painting from 1913 by the expressionist painter Franz Marc, who died in the First World War in 1916. It is one of his best-known works. The title Marc intended for a watercolor study was The trees showed their rings, the animals their veins . On the reverse Marc inscribed it with the text “And all being is flammend Leid” as an apocalyptic vision of the following world war. The current name comes from Marc's friend, the painter Paul Klee . The painting is in the holdings of the Kunstmuseum Basel .

description

In Tierschicksale , the first impression is dominated by red-jagged parts of the picture in the depicted forest, which could illustrate a forest fire. A burning trunk overturns and fire rains down. At the top left two horses shown in green flee, but the right one is turning in the wrong direction - into the center of the fire. Veins can be seen in a white triangle on his stomach. At the bottom left you can see a pair of wild boars in a still untouched part of the forest; on the right a pack of foxes (also interpreted as wolves or deer) is watching the action in a spellbound posture. In the center of the picture, a deer in blue and white colors holds its head up as if plaintively, glaring rays cut through its body, the falling tree trunk seems to hit it in the next instant.

The trees showed their rings, the animals their veins , 1913, watercolor study, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Munich

Round cut surfaces of trees can be seen on the lateral edges of the picture, which, like the veins of the horse, refer to the original title that Marc wrote on the 16.4 × 26 cm watercolor study for the painting: The trees showed their rings, the animals their veins and which the artist also gave August Macke as the title of the painting. The animals and plants are united in the concept of suffering and fate when he wrote on the back of the preliminary study: "And all being is flaming suffering", a slightly modified line from the Buddhist Dhammapada of the Pali canon by Buddha Siddhartha Gautama :

All being is flaming sorrow -
Whoever sees this with a wise mind
Will soon be fed up with suffering:
That is the way of purification.

history

The large-format painting with the dimensions 195 × 263.5 cm was created in 1913 in his place of residence in Sindelsdorf . It comes from the beginning of the abstract painting style of the artist. Franz Marc was inspired for this work by reading Gustave Flaubert's legend of Saint Julian the Hospitable .

In 1913 Marc played a key role in organizing the exhibition of Herwarth Walden's First German Autumn Salon , which took place in Berlin from September 1913. He had given seven paintings, including The Tower of the Blue Horses and Animal Fates, to the exhibition. When he received a postcard from his friend, art collector Bernhard Koehler during the war, depicting the fate of animals , he wrote to his wife Maria on March 17, 1915 from the field:

“I was shocked and excited at the sight of her. It is like a premonition of this war, gruesome and poignant; I can hardly imagine that I painted that! In any case, in the blurry photograph it seems incredibly true that I became very scary ”.

In November 1916 the painting Tierschicksale was shown in the course of the "Franz Marc Memorial Exhibition" in the Sturm Gallery by Herwarth Walden in Berlin with 52 other works and after the exhibition was placed in a warehouse of a Berlin forwarding company together with other pictures. When a large part of the paintings had already been sent to Wiesbaden, a night fire broke out in which one third of the painting was destroyed. Maria Marc took this accident as an opportunity to terminate the general agency of Walden regarding her husband's work. Paul Klee restored it at Maria Marc in Ried in the spring of 1919 after the preliminary watercolor study from 1913 and photographs in transparent brown tones, "as a service of friendship for the fallen companion whose enthusiasm for the war he had never shared" after the painting had previously been in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich a new canvas had been deposited. The difference in color is still reminiscent of the fire today.

Marc's Two Cats, Blue and Yellow , 1912, was acquired by the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1939 along with the animal fates

In 1922 the fate of animals was shown in the Franz Marc exhibition in the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin . The art historian Alois Schardt was Ludwig Justi's assistant at the Nationalgalerie at the time and played a key role in organizing the exhibition. Schardt, who became director of the Moritzburg Museum in Halle in 1926 , was able to purchase the painting for the museum in 1930. In 1935 - during the time of National Socialism - eight works of Marc from Moritzburg were named " Kulturbolshevismus " (later " degenerate art ") and banished to the "Chamber of Horrors" in the attic of the museum by Schardt's successor, Hermann Schiebel. including animal fates . Only a few visitors had access to the “Chamber of Horrors” for “study purposes”.

In 1939 the city of Basel decided to acquire important works from the holdings of the confiscated paintings for the Kunstmuseum Basel . Therefore, the newly appointed curator of the museum, Georg Schmidt, went to Berlin in May of this year to make his selection from “mighty stacks of images” - mediated by the art dealers Karl Buchholz and Hildebrand Gurlitt . Among other things, he selected the animal fates and two cats, blue and yellow by Franz Marc, The Wind Bride from 1913 by Oskar Kokoschka and the painting Ecce homo by Lovis Corinth from 1925 . He acquired animal fates for the price of 6,000 Swiss francs. The painting that is now in the Kunstmuseum Basel can no longer be borrowed.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cornelia Maser: From Weltanschauung to Weltverschauung - Franz Marc and abstraction . Grin, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-640-60401-2 , pp. 15 .
  2. ↑ Quoted from: Mahagoni Magazin
  3. ↑ a b c Quoted from Andreas Hüneke : “That is the path of purification”. Franz Marc and the First World War . In: Michael Baumgartner, Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy, Katja Schneider (Eds.): Franz Marc. Paul Klee. Dialogue in pictures . Wädenswil 2010, p. 121, ISBN 978-3-907142-50-9
  4. ↑ Claudia Öhlschläger: Tierschicksale. Franz Marc's »Animalisation of Art« or the struggle for an aesthetic of modernity . In: Gerhart von Graevenitz (Ed.): Concepts of Modernity, DFG Symposion 1997 . Springer, Stuttgart / Weimar 1999, ISBN 978-3-476-05565-1 , pp. 403 .
  5. ↑ Susanna Partsch: Marc , p. 72 f.
  6. ^ Susanna Partsch: Marc , p. 76; in: Klaus Lankheit and Uwe Steffen (eds.): Franz Marc: Letters from the field . Munich 1986, p. 50
  7. ↑ a b Helen Lagger: Franz Marc visiting a friend , bernerzeitung.ch, January 25, 2011, accessed on August 23, 2011
  8. ↑ Beate Ofczarek, Stefan Frey, in: Michael Baumgartner, Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy, Katja Schneider (Eds.), Pp. 214 ff.
  9. ↑ Andreas Hüneke, in: Michael Baumgartner, Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy, Katja Schneider (eds.), P. 129 f.
  10. ↑ Uwe Fleckner: Attack on the Avant-garde: Art and Art Politics in National Socialism. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-05-004062-2 , pp. 319, 351
  11. ↑ Beate Ofczarek, Stefan Frey, in: Michael Baumgartner, Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy, Katja Schneider (eds.), P. 223
  12. ↑ Ruth Heftrig, Olaf Peters , Ulrich Rehm (eds.): Alois J. Schardt. An art historian between the Weimar Republic, the “Third Reich” and exile in America (Writings on modern art historiography, Volume 4). Akademie, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-05-005559-6 , p. 98