August Macke

Painter, born in Meschede, WC Germany. He studied at Düsseldorf, and designed stage scenery. Profoundly influenced by Matisse, whose work he saw in Munich in 1910, he founded the Blaue Reiter group together with Franz Marc. He was a sensitive colourist, working in watercolour as well as oil, and painted the kind of subject-matter favoured by the Impressionists - figures in a park, street scenes, children, and animals (eg ‘The Zoo’, 1912). He was killed in action in Champagne, France.

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). 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. 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. 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. 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.