The fate of animals

In 1916, Franz Marc, one of the leading artists of German Expressionism, dies on the battlefields of the First World War. Three years earlier, he painted The Fate of the Animals, which strangely predicts both his own death and the global conflagration that would soon engulf Europe. Looking closely at Marc’s canvas, the American philosopher and art critic Morgan Mace discovers secret connections between ideas about the Apocalypse and the spiritual essence of painting, between the tragedy of war and the experience of religious revelation. In this search, the author is accompanied by artists Edgar Degas and Paul Klee, the German general Erich von Falkenhayn, the writer D. H. Lawrence, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, as well as Jesus Christ and the god Odin, who hangs himself on the ash tree Yggdrasil. The book The Fate of the Animals is a devastating and daring reflection on the catastrophe that permeates the universe.