The Fate of the Animals

Looking at The Fate of the Animals

Animals, trees and slanting bands of colour crowd Franz Marc’s The Fate of the Animals. A pale blue deer rises near the centre. Green horses press through the upper left, while red and brown creatures gather lower down. Tree trunks and rings appear among diagonal shafts that seem to split the forest apart. The scene is difficult to settle into a single viewpoint: an animal comes into focus, then the crossing forms pull the eye away. Marc painted this large canvas in 1913, before the First World War. Its violence has often been read through that later catastrophe, but the painting first asks us to confront the vulnerable animals inside its fractured world. ^{[1] [2]}

The German title is Tierschicksale, commonly translated as Animal Destinies or The Fate of the Animals. Basel gives a longer title in parentheses: The Trees Showed Their Rings, the Animals Their Veins. That phrase brings the trees into the drama alongside the creatures. The oil painting measures 194.7 × 263.5 cm and belongs to the Kunstmuseum Basel. Its present appearance also records a later disaster: a fire destroyed its right third, which Marc’s friend Paul Klee restored in darker colours. Looking closely therefore means looking at both Marc’s 1913 composition and the visible history of the canvas itself. ^[1]

Finding the animals in the forest

The painting offers no quiet clearing. Long red and orange diagonals run from upper left towards the lower centre, crossing branches and animal bodies. Greens bend around the shapes of horses near the top; below them, darker forms gather at the forest floor. The blue deer at the centre raises its head and neck into an opening made by the crossing lines. Its pale body provides a brief place for the eye to rest, but the stripes and sharp angles soon disturb that rest. Marc has made the animals recognizable while denying them a stable space in which to stand. ^[2]

The trees are no passive backdrop. Cut or broken forms expose circular rings, while their trunks are pressed into the same angular movement as the animals. Those rings give the longer title its force: an injured tree exposes its years of growth as an injured creature exposes what lies beneath its skin. The title makes a parallel between forms of life, but it does not tell us exactly what has happened to each animal. Looking between the visible circles of wood and the animals’ coloured bodies lets the painting’s sense of exposure emerge without inventing a single narrative for every shape. ^{[1] [3]}

Colour helps organize this crowded space. The deer’s blue and white stand against reds and oranges, while green horses remain partly entangled with the vegetation around them. Bright passages repeatedly meet dark ones. The contrast can feel like fire or violent change, as Basel’s collection writing suggests, but the red is also a device that drives the eye across a nearly two-and-a-half-metre-wide surface. Marc’s colours do more than label subjects. They connect and divide the animals, trunks and spaces at the same time. ^{[2] [1]}

The work is strikingly different from the contained, single-animal setting of Blue Horse I or the forward leap of Yellow Cow. By 1913, Marc was breaking subjects into sharper, overlapping planes. Here no animal holds the entire composition together. Each creature is part of a forest that seems to move against it. That does not mean Marc abandoned his interest in animals; it makes their relation to the surrounding world more difficult and urgent. His question about how an animal might see and inhabit a landscape had become a pictorial problem as well as an idea. ^{[4] [2]}

Franz Marc, The Fate of the Animals. Animals and trees are crossed by diagonals and fractured fields of colour.

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Explore Marc’s blue horses, the Blue Rider circle and the move towards abstraction in English-language videos.

Franz Marc, Blue Horses and Der Blaue Reiter

The Canvas

An English-language introduction to Marc’s blue horses, animals, spirituality and the Blue Rider.

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▶01 · Marc and his horsesFranz Marc, Blue Horses and Der Blaue ReiterThe Canvas▶02 · The Blue RiderWho were the Blue Rider?Tate▶03 · Towards abstractionThe Case for AbstractionThe Art Assignment · PBS Digital Studios

A painting made before the war

Marc completed Tierschicksale in 1913. A small study from that year, held by the Bavarian State Painting Collections, bears the longer title The Trees Showed Their Rings, the Animals Their Veins. It is a work on cardboard in watercolour, gouache and graphite, measuring 16.4 × 26 cm. The study helps document the composition’s development and its early title, but it is a separate object from the large Basel oil painting. Its survival is especially important because parts of the original canvas would later be lost. ^{[3] [1]}

The image can seem to anticipate the destruction of the First World War. That is a powerful later reading, not evidence that Marc painted a specific prediction in 1913. By then he had experienced conflict and change in European modern art, and the painting’s fractured forms could express a broader sense of crisis. Yet its first meanings cannot simply be replaced by the history that followed. The work’s subject is the animals’ fate within a world of damaged trees and unstable colour. Its later association with war grew from the painting’s imagery and from what Marc himself said after war began. ^{[2] [1]}

In a letter dated 17 March 1915, Marc described receiving a postcard reproduction of the painting. He found the image dreadful and moving in the light of the war and said he could hardly believe he had painted it. The response matters because it is the artist’s own, but its date matters just as much. Marc was looking back at a 1913 work from within a war he could not have known in advance. His reaction helps explain why the painting acquired a prophetic reputation; it does not turn that reputation into a documented original intention. ^{[4] [5]}

Marc died in military service on 4 March 1916. When the painting appeared in a Berlin memorial exhibition in 1917, visitors encountered it after his death and amid continuing war. That context sharpened the sense of foreboding. It also set the scene for another event that would permanently change the work: a fire in the storeroom damaged the canvas. The historical sequence—1913 painting, 1915 wartime response, 1916 death, 1917 exhibition and fire—keeps the creation of the picture distinct from its accumulating meanings. ^{[6] [1]}

The fire and Paul Klee’s repair

The storeroom fire destroyed the right third of The Fate of the Animals. Paul Klee, a fellow artist and friend of Marc, restored the damaged section in 1919, working from preparatory studies and reproductions. Basel’s account says he used noticeably darker shades, allowing the loss to remain visible. He did not repaint the entire work. The joined surface presents a rare case in which a painting’s later physical history is central to how we read its composition. ^[1]

Look across the canvas from left to right and the shift becomes part of the experience. Bright reds, greens and blues press through the earlier side; darker colours gather through the restored third. The change is not a simple border drawn down the picture, and reproductions can exaggerate or soften it according to their colour settings. Still, the darker passage makes the eye aware of an interruption in the image’s material life. Klee reconstructed a lost area so the composition could be seen again, while leaving evidence that something had happened to it. ^{[1] [2]}

The preparatory study is useful here for another reason. It gives a glimpse of the design before the 1917 damage, although its small scale and different medium cannot stand in for the lost paint. Klee also had illustrations of the work. His intervention joined evidence with his own judgement about how to restore a friend’s painting. The result is neither an untouched 1913 canvas nor an independent Klee painting. It is Marc’s work with a visible, documented repair made after a specific loss. ^{[3] [1]}

This physical interruption can deepen, but should not dictate, an emotional reading. It is tempting to see the scorched history as a perfect match for the painted upheaval. The canvas was damaged by a real fire four years after Marc made it. That fact changes the object we see today; it does not prove that the original image referred to its future damage. Holding those two realities apart makes both more vivid: the imagined threat within the forest and the actual loss and repair of a painting. ^[1]

From Halle to Basel

The painting’s ownership history continued to shape its meaning. Basel’s provenance record begins with Marc’s widow, Maria Marc, in Ried in 1916. The municipal museum for art and applied arts in Halle bought the work from her in 1930. On 21 August 1937, the Nazi Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda confiscated it from the museum as so-called “degenerate” art. The label was a term of Nazi persecution, not a description of the painting’s artistic value. By August 1938 the canvas was held in the Schönhausen Palace depot in Berlin with works considered saleable abroad. ^[1]

In 1939 the dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt purchased it from the ministry for the Kunstmuseum Basel, which acquired it through him using a special credit from the Basel government. Basel records that its director, Georg Schmidt, saw the painting in the depot and arranged the purchase before that credit had been approved. The museum identifies it as its first acquisition from the Nazi campaign against modern art. This was an acquisition through the Nazi regime’s forced disposal of a German museum holding; the precise chain is essential to the object’s history. ^{[1] [2]}

Basel also bought other modern works at the well-known Lucerne auction of June 1939. The Fate of the Animals followed a different route, through Gurlitt and the Schönhausen stock. Keeping those transactions distinct avoids turning a complicated history into a single auction story. The 1937 confiscation was another rupture in the painting’s life after the fire and repair, though of a wholly different kind. One concerned damage to the canvas; the other was state persecution of the art and its removal from a public collection. ^[1]

Looking at the whole object

The Fate of the Animals can be approached first as a forest in violent motion. Follow the green horses, return to the blue deer, then let the red diagonals carry the eye towards the darkened right side. The longer title draws attention to the exposed rings of trees and the imagined vulnerability of animal bodies. These are things the composition gives us to see. What, exactly, threatens them is less fixed. Marc’s painting permits fear, pity and fascination without settling into a literal illustrated event. ^{[2] [3]}

The work also asks us to see a century of responses and interventions. Marc’s 1915 letter gives an early wartime reading by the artist himself. Klee’s darker reconstruction lets the 1917 loss remain legible. The detailed 1930–39 provenance shows how the painting passed from Maria Marc to Halle, was seized, and reached Basel. None of these events should be made into a secret message planted in 1913. Together, they explain why the object has carried such force for later viewers, and why its present surface and history are inseparable from an attentive encounter with it. ^{[4] [1]}