August Macke

Not to be confused with Auguste Maquet.

August Macke
August Macke, Self-portrait, 1906, oil on canvas
Born	(1887-01-03)January 3, 1887 Meschede
Died	near Perthes-lès-Hurlus, France
Nationality	German
Known for	Painting
Movement	Expressionism

August Macke (3 January 1887 – 26 September 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: 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. 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.

Early life

Rokoko,1912, oil on canvas, 89 x 89 cm, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Norway

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 would also become 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 would marry 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 Böcklin 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

Tightrope walker, 1913

File:Straße mit Kirche in Kandern.jpg

Street with church in Kandern, 1911

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 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 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. 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. His final painting, Farewell, depicts the mood of gloom that settled after the outbreak of war. This was also the same year that he painted the famous painting, Türkisches Café in München (1914).

Selected paintings

• 

  The artist's wife in blue hat, 1909

• 

  Staudacher's house at the Tegernsee, 1910

• 

  Tegernsee landscape, 1910, Germanisches Nationalmuseum

• 

  Landschaft am Tegernsee mit lesendem Mann, 1910

• 

  St. Mary's with houses and chimney (Bonn), 1911, Kunstmuseum Bonn

• 

  Vegetable fields, 1911, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

• 

  Little Walter`s Toys, 1912, Städel

• 

  August Macke, View into a lane, 1914, watercolor

• 

  Two girls, 1913, Städelsches Kunstinstitut

• 

  Leute am blauen See, 1913

• 

  Promenade, 1913

• 

  Lady in a Green Jacket, 1913, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

• 

  Kairouan (III), 1914, watercolor, Westphalian State Museum for Art and Cultural History, Münster

• 

  Hutladen III, 1914

• 

  Red house in the park, 1914

August Macke Prize

Main article: 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

Main article: 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. Market in Tunis (1914) sold for £2.86 million ($4.1 million) in 2000. Consigned by the estate of Ernst Beyeler, the artist’s Im Bazar (1914) was auctioned for £3.96 million – then four and a half times the high estimate – at Christie's in 2011.

Further reading

• August Macke und die rheinischen Expressionisten ... [exhibition catalogue, Brucke-Museum, Berlin] (2002)
• August Macke und die fruhe Moderne in Europa [exhibition catalogue] (2001)
• Ursula Heiderich, August Macke Aquarelle Werkverzeichnis (1997)
• Anna Meseure, August Macke 1887-1914 [English tr. by I. Galbraith] (1991. Taschen)
• G. Vriesen, August Macke (1957)

External links

• Robert Delaunay, letter to August Macke, 1912
• Biography with photos at August Macke Haus web site
• Biography at Artchive.com
• Available Works & Biography Galerie Ludorff, Düsseldorf, Germany
• www.augustmacke.org - Biography, more than 100 images, and more.
• Works by August Macke at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)