The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Franz Marc · Tierschicksale, known in English also as Animal Destinies · oil on canvas, 1913, a large horizontal · a forest and its creatures cut by crossing shafts of red, orange and yellow light and by falling trunks, a blue deer at the centre with its neck flung back · damaged by fire, roughly its right third burnt, and restored in 1919 by Paul Klee from a photograph in a subdued, brownish key · the one canvas scored as it now stands, Marc’s painted two thirds and Klee’s restored third together
Mode
Expressionist apocalypse: the facet of Cubism, the line of force of the Futurists and a prismatic light turned from the modern city to nature destroyed
Mythos
The end of the world, built rather than alluded to; within it the innocent creature sacrificed and the forest that was shelter become the instrument
Phase
Painted in 1913; damaged by fire, roughly a third burnt; restored by Paul Klee in 1919; much reproduced since
Presentation
One large horizontal canvas in oil, the plane cut into prismatic facets, the animals set into the facets
Register
The dreadful sublime at full colour: red as matter and violence cutting through blue; the restored third in a muted, brownish key
Scale
A forest and its beasts of several kinds, under a light that falls from outside the forest
Governing Proposition
A forest is cut into facets by shafts of red, orange and yellow light that come down from the upper left like blows, and by trunks that break and fall across the field. The animals are not in front of this but inside it, cut by the same lines that cut the trees and the air. At the centre a blue deer throws its neck back and up into the path of a falling tree; at the left wild boars crowd a dark green and brown zone. The painter had built his art on the animal as the innocent creature, closer to the order of things than man. Here that order breaks, and its wager is that the borrowed means of the modern city, the facet and the line of force, can carry the end of a world, with the innocent struck first.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Franz Marc painted Tierschicksale in 1913, in oil on a large horizontal canvas. In English it is called Fate of the Animals or Animal Destinies. It belongs to the last years of his work before the war: he had come to his own manner with the rounded, harmonious animals of the Blaue Reiter years, 1911 to 1912, and this canvas breaks that manner.
Marc died in 1916. The canvas was damaged by fire, and roughly its right third was burnt. In 1919 Paul Klee restored it, repainting the lost part from a photograph in a deliberately subdued, brownish key, so that the repair can be read as repair. The canvas has been widely reproduced since; the loss is visible in every reproduction.
The unit weighed is the one canvas as it now stands: Marc’s two thirds and Klee’s restored third together. Klee’s work is restoration, making good what was lost, and it bears on The Imperishable alone. Every other axis is read on Marc’s composition, which the restoration keeps legible in its drawing. No words of the painter’s are quoted here.
Movement II
The field is organised by crossing diagonals: shafts of red, orange and yellow light and falling trunks, cutting the plane into prismatic facets. The animals are set into those facets rather than in front of them. At the centre a blue deer throws its neck back and up, and a falling tree crosses over it. At the left, wild boars, one of them red, crowd a darker green and brown zone. At the right, in the restored part, further animals are drawn into the same breaking forest.
The deer is the one creature whose whole body is given to the catastrophe. Its neck is bent back into the path of the trunk; the diagonals converge on it; it is an animal looking up at what is falling on it. It takes the place the lamb holds, the creature that suffers for no fault of its own, offering its throat to the falling tree. Remove it and the picture loses its centre and its victim.
Remove the red shafts and there is no event, only animals in a forest: the light is the blow. Remove the boars and the cataclysm loses its breadth, its sense that it takes every kind. Not everything is required. The zones at the left and right are crowded with faceted incident, the eye has to hunt for some of the creatures, and that hunting is partly the point and partly surplus.
Movement III
The colour is the painter’s symbolic scheme as he set it out in his letters of 1910, blue for the spiritual and masculine, yellow for the gentle and feminine, red for matter, brutal and heavy, here driven to violence. Red is the dominant active colour, and it cuts through the blue. The deer’s blue is placed exactly where the reds converge. Turn the canvas to a tonal version and the argument in colour is gone.
What is disclosed can be stated. Marc had built his art on the animal as the innocent, unfallen creature, closer to the order of things than man. Here that order breaks: the animals are not spared, violence is in the frame of nature itself, and the innocent suffer without fault. It is a turn against his own faith, and that gives it weight. The reading of the picture as a foreseeing of the war is made after the event, and the page credits it as what the image was able to hold, not as foresight.
The limit is in articulation. Much of what the canvas gives is a state, dread and the shock of the end, and its meaning is stated more as cry than as condition: it does not say why the world breaks. The faceting that makes the catastrophe also distances it, so that terror is partly turned into pattern, and the myth it builds, the end of the world as such, is all event and no aftermath.
Movement IV
The knowledge of the work is fracture. The faceted plane, the shafts of light that are also blows, the animals cut by the same lines that cut the trees and the sky: paint the same deer and boars in the painter’s earlier rounded manner under a stormy sky and the picture becomes an illustration of a disaster. Here the disaster is the structure of the picture, and the large horizontal makes it a field the eye crosses, a world rather than an incident.
One law holds the field: creature, tree and air are cut by the same lines of force and lit by the same broken light. The making is load-bearing at the centre, the colour held at full saturation across a large field without turning to noise, the deer’s arched neck carrying a long study of animal bodies into the new idiom. At the edges it is less so. The facets crowd, some passages are worked to a sameness, and the animal drawing keeps some of its earlier roundness, sitting in places against the faceting as a second law rather than inside the first.
The right third is Klee’s. His repainting follows Marc’s drawing and keeps the composition legible, so the defining form survives; what was lost is the colour of a third of a picture whose argument is partly in colour, and with it the elevation the colour carried there. The subdued key marks the loss rather than hiding it. A major painter’s restoration of his dead friend’s canvas has become part of what the picture means.
Movement V
The inheritance was German Romantic and Symbolist painting of animals and landscape, and the painter’s own Blaue Reiter manner. He took the faceting of Cubism, the lines of force of the Futurists, shown in Germany in 1912, and Delaunay’s prismatic light, and turned them from the modern city to nature destroyed, from dynamism to eschatology. The means were borrowed and remain visibly so, and Kandinsky beside him was making the same turn toward fracture: the swerve is decisive for the painter, less so for the field.
The canvas showed that the new structural means could carry the end of a world. It is one of the decisive statements of the Expressionist apocalypse and the most complete synthesis in German painting of Cubist and Futurist fracture with Expressionist feeling and colour. Its reach was cut short: the painter died in 1916, the movement was broken by the war, and the picture was out of view until 1919. It has lived on as an emblem, of the Blaue Reiter, of the art before 1914, of the art the Nazis called degenerate, more than as a model.
Among neighbours it stands level with Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space at 8.2, the source of part of its means and the larger swerve; a tenth above Kandinsky’s Composition VI at 8.1, for a disclosure stated and an apocalypse built where the deluge dissolves; and below Kandinsky’s Composition VII and Munch’s The Scream at 8.7 and Dix’s The War (Der Krieg) at 8.6, the war held rather than foreseen. Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the sacrificial and cataclysmic work of the same year, stands a tier above at 9.2. The deer is still looking up at the trunk.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive. Remove the deer and the picture loses its centre and its victim: it is the one creature whose whole body is given to the catastrophe, neck bent back into the path of the falling tree, and the diagonals converge on it. Remove the shafts of red and there is no event, only animals in a forest; the light is the blow. Remove the boars and the cataclysm has no breadth, no sense that it takes every kind. The large scale is compelled: the catastrophe must be bigger than the viewer. What yields is real. The left and right zones are crowded with faceted incident, and some subsidiary planes and animal fragments could be shifted or thinned without loss.
Score: 8.2 / 10
What is disclosed can be stated. The painter had made the animal the innocent, unfallen creature, closer to the order of things than man. Here that order breaks: the animals are not spared, violence is in the frame of nature itself, and the innocent suffer without fault. The proposition holds, and it is a turn against his own faith, which gives it weight. The reading of the picture as a foreseeing of the war is made after the event; it is credited as what the image was able to hold, not as foresight. Held below the gate because much of what the canvas gives is a state, dread and the shock of the end, stated more as cry than as articulated condition. It does not say why the world breaks.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The elevation is the dreadful sublime, reached across the field, not once. The red shafts come down like judgement from the upper left; the deer’s flung-back neck is the height of the picture’s terror, an animal looking up at what is falling on it; the trees break; the whole plane shatters into light. The scale carries it, the diagonals passing over and past the viewer, and the colour is at full pitch, red against blue, a world going up in fire and glass at once. The height recurs, in the boars’ dark zone, in the crossing trunks, in the right side’s surviving drawing. Held short of the top because the faceting that makes the catastrophe also distances it, terror partly turned into pattern, and because in the restored third the colour that carried the elevation is gone.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The archetype is the end of the world, and it is built, not alluded to: the composition is the cataclysm, every plane a fragment of a breaking cosmos. Two patterns inside it bear load. The innocent sacrificed: the deer at the centre, offering its throat to the falling tree, takes the place the lamb holds, the creature that suffers for no fault of its own. And the fall of the world tree: trunks break across the field, and the forest that was shelter becomes the instrument. The particular is kept; these are animals painted as animals, not emblems. Held below the gate because the archetype is the most general one, apocalypse as such, built by fragmentation rather than by a structure with a story or a turn in it: all event and no aftermath.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is twofold: German Romantic and Symbolist painting of animals and landscape, and the painter’s own rounded, harmonious animals of the Blaue Reiter years, 1911 to 1912. The departure is from both. He takes the faceting of Cubism, the lines of force of the Futurists, shown in Germany in 1912, and Delaunay’s prismatic light, and turns them from the analysis or celebration of the modern city to a vision of nature destroyed; and he turns against his own subject by making the peaceable animal the victim. The stake was real: a large canvas that broke the idiom his reputation stood on. Held below the gate because the means were borrowed and visibly so, and because Kandinsky beside him was making the same turn toward fracture: decisive for him, less so for the field.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is that the world is breaking and the creatures with it, and it is known as fracture: the faceted plane, the shafts of light that are also blows, the animals cut by the same lines that cut the trees and the sky. Paint the same deer and boars in the earlier rounded manner under a stormy sky and the picture becomes an illustration of a disaster; here the disaster is the structure of the picture. The colour is form too: red as matter and violence cutting through the blue of the spiritual animal is the argument in colour. Held at 8.5 because the faceting is partly a manner applied across the plane, and in places the form decorates the catastrophe rather than enacting it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over promise: more than a century of return, and a literature that keeps coming back, over a narrower set of questions than the greatest pictures carry. What it means for a canvas of 1913 to be read as a premonition of the war that killed its painter, and whether that reading enlarges the work or traps it. How far the picture obeys the painter’s colour theory. Its relation to his spiritual reading and to Kandinsky. Klee’s restoration, an act of mourning and of conservation in one, and what the subdued third does to the whole. The canvas yields detail on return. Held at 8.0 because the central meaning is clear at first sight and the debate turns largely around the biography and the war rather than out of the surface.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The field is German painting from 1910 to 1914. The intrinsic force is real: the canvas is one of the decisive statements of the Expressionist apocalypse, and the most complete synthesis in German painting of Cubist and Futurist fracture with Expressionist feeling and colour. It showed that the new structural means could carry eschatology. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force, and here it is discounted: the painter died in 1916, the movement was broken by the war, and the picture was out of view, damaged, until 1919. Its later reach is as an emblem, of the Blaue Reiter, of the art before 1914, of the art the Nazis called degenerate, more than as a model; no particular later work can be named that it redirected. Force near 8.5, reach nearer 7.5.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at more than a century. The charge is real. Form: roughly a third of the painted surface was destroyed by fire, and with it the painter’s colour on the right side. Klee’s restoration kept the drawing and the composition legible, so the defining form survives; what was lost is the colour of a third of a picture whose argument is partly in colour. That is more than fabric and less than the loss of the work’s meaning, and it is charged in proportion. Presence: shown, hidden while damaged, restored, and widely reproduced since; fame lifts the figure only a tenth. The restoration bears on this axis alone. Charged from the usual figure for the span to 8.6.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as command of oil on a large canvas, to the anchors used for any medium. The command is strong. The colour is managed at full saturation across a large field without turning to noise: reds, oranges and yellows against deep blues and greens, with the deer’s blue placed exactly where the reds converge. The faceting is drawn with conviction, the long diagonals holding the plane together, and the deer’s arched neck carries the painter’s long study of animal bodies into the new idiom without losing the creature. The costs are charged: at the left and right the facets crowd and the animals become hard to read, some passages are worked to a sameness, and the joining of rounded animal and crystalline plane is not everywhere solved.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the deer at the centre, flung back in blue under the falling trunk, and the boars at the far left in their dark, closed zone. One law holds them. Everything in the field, creature, tree and air, is cut by the same lines of force and lit by the same broken light, so that animal and world suffer the same fracture; the law is the picture’s meaning, and it reaches from the cosmic shafts to an animal’s eye. What resists: the animal drawing keeps some of its earlier roundness and in places sits against the faceting as a second law rather than inside the first, and the colour logic, so strong at the centre, loosens toward the edges. The restored third is not charged here; Klee’s drawing follows the painter’s law.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The orders held in one field: the natural order, in the forest and beasts of several kinds; the cosmic, in the light that falls from outside the forest; the sacred, as judgement, sacrifice and the end of things; suffering as the condition of every creature; and, by implication, history, a catastrophe the picture names without picturing. They are integrated by the one fracture that passes through all of them. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: no human figure, no consciousness but the animal’s, no family, no labour, no state. The war is brought to the picture, not held in it. It encompasses more than a landscape, a world and its ending, and less than a picture of human society. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Sublime and The Living Form at 8.5. A defining form that survives a fire, its burnt third restored in a key that marks the loss; a dreadful sublime reached across the whole field, red shafts falling like judgement on a deer that looks up at them; and a form that is the knowledge, the world and its creatures known as one fracture.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.1: nature, the cosmic, the sacred and suffering held in one structure, but no human figure, no family, no labour, no state, and the war brought to the picture rather than held in it. Then The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0: a meaning clear at first sight, a debate that turns on the biography and the war, real force and a reach cut short by the painter’s death and the war, living on as emblem more than as model.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.2, The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, The Swerve at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 fall short of it: the disclosure is given more as dread than as articulated condition and does not say why the world breaks, the archetype is apocalypse as such, all event and no aftermath, the means were borrowed and the turn to fracture was being made beside the painter at the same moment, and the reach was cut off by the war and survives as emblem rather than model. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 98.5, an average of 8.208 that displays 8.2, in Tier IV, two tenths above the 8.0 at which it begins and well short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the composition and its history, from reproduction and from the literature; not from standing before the canvas. The composition is known well; the particulars of the animals at the right, and the surface as an object, less well, and they are described here only as far as they are certain. The work scored is the one canvas as it now stands: Franz Marc, Fate of the Animals (Tierschicksale), oil on canvas, 1913, damaged by fire with roughly its right third burnt, and restored in 1919 by Paul Klee, who repainted the lost part from a photograph in a deliberately subdued, brownish key. Marc’s two thirds and Klee’s restored third are scored together; the restoration bears on The Imperishable alone, and every other axis is read on Marc’s composition, which it keeps legible. No words are quoted: no inscription and no statement of the painter’s is given. The reading of the picture as a premonition of the war is stated as a reading made after the event, not as foresight. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the canvas’s dimensions, the museum that holds it and when it entered it, where it was first shown, the date and place of the fire and the circumstances of the painter’s death, the words written on the reverse and any earlier title, the painter’s own wartime remarks on the picture, and the kinds of the animals in the restored third.