August Macke

August Macke (1887-1914), German Expressionist painter, a prominent member of Der Blaue Reiter, a group of Expressionist artists that was centred in Munich.

He was born in Meschede, Westphalia, and trained under Eduard von Gebhardt at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie between 1904 and 1906. This was followed in 1907-1908 by a period of study in Berlin under the German Impressionist Lovis Corinth. Despite these experiences, Macke was greatly influenced by the expressive colours of both the Fauvists and Robert Delaunay, whose work he saw on his visits to Paris in 1907 and 1912. After meeting Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky in Munich, he co-founded Der Blaue Reiter in 1911. Some of his most celebrated works are the result of a trip to Tunisia in April 1914 with Louis Moilliet and Paul Klee, who were also associated with Der Blaue Reiter. Soon after his return, he joined the army and was killed in action that September at Perthes-les-Hurlus, France.

Macke made a highly significant, if short-lived, contribution to German Expressionism. Unlike Kandinsky, who attempted to express a spiritual reality beyond the physical world, Macke produced little abstract work, concentrating instead on lyrical images of the natural world. In Large Zoological Garden (1912, Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund), for example, children are shown standing enthralled in front of brightly coloured birds and antelopes. Such paintings exemplify the untroubled sensuality that dominates Macke's work, strikingly free of the angst that characterizes so much of German Expressionism. Only rarely does Macke express a more pessimistic vision, as in Farewell (1914, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne), a sombrely coloured, claustrophobic image, where faceless women wait solemnly while their men enlist. Macke's most remarkable works are perhaps the luminous watercolours that he produced in Tunisia earlier in 1914, images that he translated into oil on canvas following his return to Germany. These late works include Turkish Café II (1914, Stadtische Galerie, Munich), which exemplifies the way in which Macke created forms out of flat planes of colour, without outlines or any illusion of light and shade.

Despite the influential metaphysical interests of other Blaue Reiter artists, most notably Kandinsky, Macke was primarily interested in expressing his own highly individual response to the physical world. As his friend Lothar Erdmann put it in 1908: “All ideas of the beyond are foreign to him ... He ... sees only the present, and takes life as it comes, rather than as it has become.” It is this quality of spontaneity, combined with his obvious delight in nature, that gives his work its lasting appeal.