A review of “The Cry of Nature: Art and the Making of Animal Rights” (2013) by Stephen F. Eisenman

This paper is an intensely-focused study of Expressionist painter Franz Marc’s 1911 “Liegender Hund im Schnee” (Dog Lying in the Snow), a portrait of Marc’s dog, Russi. The purpose of this analysis is to show Marc’s careful description of the dog, in both his writings and the titles of other paintings of Russi, to depict the challenging subjects…[Read more]

This paper uses aspects of the type of Nachträglichkeit, or deferred action, as described by Hal Foster in “The Return of the Real” (1996) to recover Franz Marc’s utopian visions of Eden as shown in the mural Marc made with August Macke called “Paradies”. Traces of Marc’s ideas about animals and utopia can be found in Joan Jonas’s 2009 “Reading…[Read more]