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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 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 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. |
