Reitschule (Riding School)

In 1913 Marc produced a major painting originally titled The Trees Show Their Rings, the Animals Their Veins, but then retitled as The Fate of the Animals. Like Riding School, this painting shares a dynamic and rhythmic geometry that vibrates between animal and botanical life forms. As Richard Cork has noted, when Marc was at the front in 1915 he wrote of the painting: “It is like a premonition of this war, at once horrible and stirring. I can hardly believe that I painted it. 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.”