August Macke Prints

About August Macke

August Macke was born in 1887 in Meschede, in Westphalia, and grew up in Cologne and Bonn. He studied at the Düsseldorf academy and the city's school of arts and crafts, and on visits to Paris from 1907, helped by the Berlin collector Bernhard Koehler, uncle of his future wife Elisabeth Gerhardt, he discovered the Impressionists and later the Fauves. He married Elisabeth in 1909 and spent a year at Tegernsee in Bavaria, where he met Franz Marc, who became his closest friend. Through Marc he joined the Blue Rider circle, though he kept his distance from Kandinsky's spiritual theories, preferring, as he put it, to praise nature. Back in Bonn from 1911, he visited Robert Delaunay in Paris with Marc in 1912, and Delaunay's luminous colour shaped his last two years: the strollers, shop windows and lakeside scenes he painted at Hilterfingen on Lake Thun in 1913–14, and the watercolours from his journey to Tunisia with Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet in April 1914. Called up when war broke out, he was killed in Champagne on 26 September 1914, at twenty-seven. His pictures of people at ease in clear light are among the happiest of early modern painting, and they bring the feeling of a fine summer afternoon to a wall.