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August Macke | |
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 August Macke,Self-portrait, 1906, oil on canvas | |
| Born | (1887-01-03)3 January 1887 Meschede, German Empire |
| Died | 26 September 1914(1914-09-26) (aged 27) near Perthes-lès-Hurlus,Champagne, France |
| Resting place | German Military Cemetery,Souain-Perthes-lès-Hurlus |
| Nationality | German |
| Known for | Painting |
| Notable work | List of paintings |
| Movement | Expressionism |
| Signature | |
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August Robert Ludwig Macke (3 January 1887 – 26 September 1914) was a German Expressionist painter. He was one of the leading members of the GermanExpressionist groupDer 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.[1] Like his friendFranz Marc andOtto Soltau, he was one of the young German artists who died in theFirst World War.
August Robert Ludwig Macke was born in Germany on 3 January 1887, inMeschede,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'sSauerland 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 ofArnold Böcklin which he saw on a visit to Basel in 1900. In 1904 Macke's father died, and in that year Macke enrolled at theKunstakademie Düsseldorf, underAdolf 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 theSchauspielhaus Düsseldorf, and visited northern Italy (1905) and Netherlands, Belgium and Britain (1906).
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Thereafter Macke lived most of his creative life inBonn, with the exception of a few periods spent atLake Thun in Switzerland and various trips to Paris, Italy, theNetherlands andTunisia. In Paris, where he traveled for the first time in 1907, Macke saw the work of theImpressionists, and shortly after he went to Berlin and spent a few months inLovis Corinth's studio. His style was formed within the mode of French Impressionism andPost-Impressionism and later went through aFauve period. In 1909 he married Elisabeth Gerhardt. In 1910, through his friendship withFranz Marc, Macke metKandinsky and for a while shared the non-objective aesthetic and the mystical and symbolic interests ofDer Blaue Reiter.
Macke's meeting withRobert Delaunay in Paris in 1912 was to be a sort of revelation for him. Delaunay's chromaticCubism, whichApollinaire had calledOrphism, influenced Macke's art from that point onwards. HisShops Windows can be considered a personal interpretation of Delaunay'sWindows, combined with the simultaneity of images found in ItalianFuturism.
The exotic atmosphere of Tunisia, where Macke traveled in April 1914 withPaul Klee andLouis Moilliet was fundamental for the creation of theluminist approach of his final period, during which he produced a series of works now considered masterpieces, like his famous paintingTürkisches Café. August Macke's oeuvre can be considered asExpressionism (in its originalGerman 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 ofthe First World War at the front in Champagne, France, on 26 September 1914. He was buried in the German Military Cemetery inSouain-Perthes-lès-Hurlus.[2] His final painting,Farewell, depicts the mood of gloom that settled after the outbreak of war.
TheAugust Macke Prize, was given the first time in 1959 by the districts Arnsberg, Brilon, Olpe andMeschede, town of birth of August Macke in Germany.
TheAugust-Macke-Haus is a museum dedicated to August Macke founded in 1991. It is located in Macke's former home inBonn, where he lived from 1911 to 1914.
At a 1997Christie's auction, Macke'sThe Couple at a Garden Table (1914) was sold for £2 million.[3]Market in Tunis (1914) sold for £2.86 million ($4.1 million) in 2000.[4] Consigned by the estate ofErnst Beyeler, the artist'sIn the Bazar (1914) was auctioned for £3.96 million – then four and a half times the high estimate – at Christie's in 2011.[5]
In 2007, the Berlin auction house Villa Grisebach sold Macke’sWoman 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.[6]
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