August Macke
August Macke (January 3, 1887 ? September 26, 1914) was one
of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue
Reiter (The Blue Rider). He lived during a particularly innovative
time for German art which saw the development of the main German
Expressionist movements as well as the arrival of the successive
avant-garde movements which were forming in the rest of Europe.
Like a true artist of his time, Macke knew how to integrate into
his oil painting the elements of the avant-garde which most
interested him.
Macke was born in Meschede, Germany. His father, August Friedrich
Hermann Macke (1845-1904), was a building contractor and his
mother, Maria Florentine, née Adolph, (1848-1922), came from a
farming family in Germany's Sauerland region. The family lived at
Brüsseler Straße until August was 13. He then lived most of his
creative life in Bonn, with the exception of a few periods spent at
Lake Thun in Switzerland and various trips to Paris, Italy, Holland
and Tunisia. In Paris, where he travelled for the first time in
1907, Macke saw the work of the
Impressionists,
and shortly after he went to Berlin and spent a few months in Lovis
Corinth's studio. His style was formed within the mode of French
Impressionism and
Post-impressionism
and later went through a Fauve period. In 1909 he married Elizabeth
Gerhardt. In 1910, through his friendship with Franz Marc, Macke
met
Wassily
Kandinsky and for a while shared the non-objective aesthetic and
the mystical and symbolic interests of Der blaue Reiter.
Macke's meeting with Robert Delaunay in Paris in 1912 was to be a
sort of revelation for him. Delaunay's chromatic
Cubism, which
Apollinaire had called Orphism, influenced Macke's art from that
point onwards. His Shops Windows can be considered a personal
interpretation of Delaunay's Windows, combined with the
simultaneity of images found in Italian Futurism. The exotic
atmosphere of Tunisia, where Macke travelled in 1914 with
Paul Klee and Louis
Moilliet was fundamental for the creation of the luminist approach
of his final period, during which he produced a series of works now
considered masterpieces. Macke's career was cut short by his early
death at the front in World War I in September 1914.
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