August Robert Ludwig Macke (3 January 1887 – 26 September 1914) was a German Expressionist painter. He was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). He lived during a particularly active time for German art: he 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. As an artist of his time, Macke knew how to integrate into his painting the elements of the avant-garde which most interested him.
Early life
August Robert Ludwig Macke was born in Germany on 3 January 1887, in
Meschede,
Westphalia. He was the only son of August Friedrich Hermann Macke (1845–1904), a building contractor and amateur artist, and his wife, Maria Florentine, née Adolph, (1848–1922), who came from a farming family in Westphalia's
Sauerland region. Shortly after August's birth the family settled at Cologne, where Macke was educated at the Kreuzgymnasium (1897–1900) and became a friend of Hans Thuar, who also became an artist. In 1900, when he was thirteen, the family moved to Bonn, where Macke studied at the Realgymnasium and became a friend of Walter Gerhardt and Gerhardt's sister, Elisabeth, whom he married a few years later.
The first artistic works to make an impression on the boy were his father's drawings, the Japanese prints collected by his friend Thuar's father and the works of Arnold Bocklin which he saw on a visit to Basel in 1900. In 1904 Macke's father died, and in that year Macke enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, under Adolf Maennchen (1904–1906). During this period he also took evening classes under Fritz Helmut Ehmke (1905), did some work as a stage and costume designer at the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf, and visited northern Italy (1905) and Netherlands, Belgium and Britain (1906).
Artistic career 1907–1914
Thereafter Macke 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, the
Netherlands and
Tunisia. In Paris, where he traveled for the first time in 1907, Macke saw the work of the
Impressionism, 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
Fauvism period. In 1909 he married Elisabeth 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 traveled in April 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, like his famous painting Türkisches Café. August Macke's oeuvre can be considered as Expressionism (in its original German flourishing between 1905 and 1925), and also as part of Fauvism. The paintings concentrate primarily on expressing feelings and moods rather than reproducing objective reality, usually distorting colour and form.
Macke's career was cut short by his early death in the second month of the First World War at the front in Champagne, France, on 26 September 1914. He was buried in the German Military Cemetery in Souain-Perthes-lès-Hurlus.
Selected paintings
File:August Macke 036.jpg| The artist's wife in blue hat, 1909
File:Macke - Staudacherhaus am Tegernsee.jpg| Staudacher's house at the Tegernsee, 1910
File:1910 Macke Tegernsee Landschaft anagoria.JPG|Tegernsee landscape, 1910, Germanisches Nationalmuseum
File:Macke - Landschaft am Teggernsee mit lesendem Mann.jpg| Landschaft am Tegernsee mit lesendem Mann, 1910
File:August Macke 030.jpg| St. Mary's with houses and chimney (Bonn), 1911, Kunstmuseum Bonn
File:August Macke 014.jpg| Vegetable fields, 1911, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany
File:1912 Macke Walterchens Spielsachen anagoria.JPG|Little Walter's Toys, 1912, Städel
1913 Macke Zwei Mädchen anagoria.JPG|Two girls, 1913, Städelsches Kunstinstitut
File:August Macke - Leute am blauen See.jpg| Leute am blauen See, 1913
File:Macke, August - Promenade - Google Art Project.jpg| Promenade, 1913
File:August Macke 005.jpg| Lady in a Green Jacket, 1913, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany
File:August Macke 004.jpg| View into a lane, 1914, watercolor
File:August Macke 023.jpg| Kairouan (III), 1914, watercolor, Westphalian State Museum for Art and Cultural History, Münster
File:Macke Hutladen III.jpg| Hutladen III, 1914
File:Macke - Rotes Haus im Park.jpg| Red house in the park, 1914
File:August Macke - Bernhard Koehler.jpg| Portrait of Bernhard Koehler, 1910, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
File:August Macke 051.jpg| Turkish Café, 1914, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
File:August Macke - Indianer auf Pferden.jpg| Indians on Horseback, 1911, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
August Macke Prize
The August Macke Prize, was given the first time in 1959 by the districts Arnsberg, Brilon, Olpe and
Meschede, town of birth of August Macke in Germany.
August-Macke-Haus
The August-Macke-Haus is a museum dedicated to August Macke founded in 1991. It is located in Macke's former home in
Bonn, where he lived from 1911 to 1914.
Art market
At a 1997 Christie's auction, Macke's
The Couple at a Garden Table (1914) was sold for £2 million.
(1914) sold for £2.86 million ($4.1 million) in 2000.
Consigned by the estate of
Ernst Beyeler, the artist's
In the Bazar (1914) was auctioned for £3.96 million – then four and a half times the high estimate – at Christie's in 2011.
In 2007, the Berlin auction house Villa Grisebach sold Macke’s Woman with a Parrot in a Landscape for €2.4 million, setting a record price for the artist. The painting's provenance mentioned it was confiscated in 1937 as 'degenerate'. In the 2008 catalogue of Macke’s works, Hildebrand Gurlitt, Hitler's art dealer was mentioned in the provenance.
Further reading
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(exhibition catalogue)
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(exhibition catalogue)
External links
