Three Paintings Trilogy

In 1913, Franz Marc, one of the key figures of German Expressionism, created a masterpiece: “The Fate of the Animals”. With its violent slashes of color and line, the painting seemed to pre-figure both the outbreak of World War I and, more eerily, Marc's own death in an artillery barrage at the Battle of Verdun three years later. With his signature blend of wide-ranging erudition and lively, accessible prose, Morgan Meis explores Marc's painting in depth, guided in part by a series of letters Marc wrote to his wife Maria while he was a soldier in the war. In those letters, Marc explores the nature of art, the fate of European civilization, and the inner spiritual nature of all life. Along the way, Meis brings in other artists such as D.H. Lawrence, Edgar Degas, and Paul Klee to flesh out his argument. The Fate of the Animals also explores the darker undercurrents of German apocalyptic thinking in Marc's time, especially Norse mythology and the ancient Vedic texts as they influenced Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.

In the final, absorbing volume of his Three Paintings Trilogy, philosopher and critic Morgan Meis explores the art of Joan Mitchell and in particular one of her crowning achievements, the Grand Valley series. Mitchell, a twentieth-century American artist who found herself living and working in France, is a figure of contradictions-at once formidable and fragile, solitary and hungry for human connection. The Grand Valley paintings, born from a memory not her own, become a focal point for understanding Mitchell's approach to abstraction and landscape. Meis examines the pain and, at times, even violence within Mitchell's work, connecting it to her turbulent life and the critical interpretations of her art (including her struggle to be treated as seriously as her male peers). As with the previous acclaimed volumes in this trilogy, Meis begins with a work of art and moves outward toward history, philosophy, and religion to provide context and insight. With his characteristically disarming wit and linguistic playfulness, Meis investigates the idea of the artist's self, drawing upon the mystical aspects of Carl Jung's thought and discovering parallels between Mitchell and obsessive creators like Claude Monet and Gertrude Stein. Humorous and accessible, yet always willing to grapple with the most vexing and challenging issues of human finitude, The Grand Valley brings an innovative trilogy to a rich and satisfying conclusion.

The Drunken Silenus is a book that is as hard to categorize as it is to put down--an enlightening and mesmerizing blend of philosophy, history, and art criticism. Morgan Meis begins simply enough, with a painting by the Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens of the figure from Greek mythology who is mentor to Dionysus, god of wine and excess of every kind. We learn who this obscure, minor god is--why he must attend on the god who dies and must be re-born and educated all over again--and why Rubens depicted him not as a character out of a farce, but as one whose plight evokes pity and compassion. The narrative spirals out from there, taking in the history of Antwerp, bloody seventeenth-century religious wars, tales of Rubens's father's near-execution for sleeping with William of Orange's wife, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and the impossibility of there being any meaning to human life, and the destruction of all civilization by nefarious forces within ourselves. All of this is conveyed in language that crackles with intelligence, wit, and dark humor--a voice that at times sounds a bit tipsy and garrulous, but which ultimately asks us to confront the deepest questions of meaning, purpose, and hope in the face of death and tragedy.