N. Senada posted:

It should be a rule to publish the artist and title with the picture. I know it's only a google image search away, but it's also not that hard to addendum your post.

quote:

"It is like a premonition of this war, horrible and gripping. I can hardly believe I painted it! But in the blurred photograph it appears incomprehensibly real, giving me the most uncanny feeling. Yet it is artistically rational to paint such a picture before the war, and not simply as a dumb memory after it is all over. That is the time to be painting formative pictures symbolic of the future."

I wrote a ~14 page paper about this painting for an Art History class. I initially picked it because I liked the look, but after digging into it, I found it so compelling that I had absolutely no trouble meeting the 12+ page limit that I'd been terrified of. I might as well dust off that paper and give a shot at explaining it again!

BRACE YOURSELVES, EFFORTPOST IMMINENT

The first thing you might notice when looking at the painting are the chaotic masses of shapes and colors coalescing into animals and vague figures as your eye wanders the image. That sense of world-ending chaos is very important to keep in mind. On the far right, that weird blob of discoloration is the result of the painting being damaged in a fire, and restoration occurring after Marc's death.

To summarize the image from the top left and going counterclockwise:

Streaks of red rain down in a blue sky, hurtling toward earth like flames to strike the forest scene below. Directly underneath them are a pair of green horses. The horses are panicking, and one has a triangular white blotch on its flank with red veins showing - incidentally, the painting's working title was The Trees Show Their Rings, The Animals Their Veins. Check the position of the wound compared to the stark white rings of the tree trunk in front of the other horse, and how much the red wood looks like blood gushing out. A sea of red separates the horses from two boars, one seeming to shelter the other from the destruction with its body as they wait for the end. Next to them is the centerpiece of the painting, a blue deer being struck in the throat with a ray of red that goes straight through it, as it bares itself to a falling tree about to crush it. The landscape seems to become a weapon that severs trees in the burnt portion, and a small group of animals whose identities are unclear - I side with foxes, some people say deer - hide and look curiously at the firestorms above.

Something very important to analyzing Tierschicksale is the evolution of Marc's art over the shockingly few years he spent actively painting. This painting from 1910 was one of his many, many studies of horses:



And this from 1912 (note its use of blue and red and the body language of the two horses; I'll be coming back to this one):



By 1913 and Tierschicksale, he was painting full-on expressionist paintings and was showing no signs of slowing down by the time he was drafted. To summarize a lot, he started out drawing anatomical pictures of horses and his artistic method evolved from there, before settling on his uses of colors. To massively simplify what he described in a few letters, blue was the color of spirituality, thought, and masculinity, yellow was gentle, cheery, femininity, and red was rage, physicality, and "base matter." Go back and check out that domineering, enraged red horse threatening the reserved and thoughtful blue horse. He painted only animals for a long time because he was a big fan of the idea that nature was inherently purer, cleaner, and more wholesome than mankind, but his view changed by the time Tierschicksale came around. He "suddenly became aware of the ugliness, the impurity of nature" after his experimentations with abstract form, and adopted the extremely pre-WWI German idea that a giant war to burn away the filth of the world was just what Europe needed to grow back better and stronger. Industrialized warfare delivered its counterpoint to him on the wings of the grenade that killed him in a trench in Verdun.

Now, back from that (abbreviated) tangent, we can look at the use of animals and colors in Tierschicksale. The blue deer is spirituality sacrificing itself to the destruction of/by nature, embodied by the "comforting" yellow of the tree lessening the blow. The deer is the world offering itself to destructive sacrifice. This sacrifice shields the red boars, redeeming their brutal nature and allowing for compassion, while the horses, the animals Marc once loved to paint, are consumed by eviscerating debris and flames due to their separation. The foxes in the corner are a controversial aspect of the painting, with at least one scholar calling up images of Norse-Germanic mythology, Ragnarok, and Yggrdasil, which I never bought. I think it's just nature hiding itself from the destruction of man; look how all the lines break at their refuge and do not point at them.

One final note: on the back of the canvas, Marc wrote the words "And all being is flaming suffering," which, aside from being fantastically , is another link to his philosophy of purging by fire.

And the funny thing? The class I wrote this paper for was the only art class I've ever taken. My professor was loving amazing, and ignited an appreciation of art that's burned in me since then. I went from "pfffbtt, a bunch of Campbell's Soup cans, what's the big deal? " to "Andy Warhol was loving nuts and also awesome "

...but I still don't get Jackson Pollock.

PlatinumJukebox posted:

edit: Here's a collection of all the art submitted by goons in the last PYF Art thread. There's an amazing variety of stuff in there, so please take the time to look through it!

The Saddest Rhino posted:

I've always been partial to Velasquez's Pope Innocent X painting and Bacon's interpretation after:





E:


I didn't see this link, that's an amazing lot of stuff!

Augster posted:

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog - Caspar David Friedrich

N. Senada posted:

Francisco Goya of Spain, Saturno devorando a su hijo (Saturn Devouring His Son).

Shbobdb posted:

Augster posted:

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog - Caspar David Friedrich

Friends Are Evil posted:

Oh gently caress yeah, another one of these threads! Lately, I've been looking at a lot of Odilon Redon's work.

Stravinsky posted:

Dina Valls

Side Effects posted:

Andrew Salgado