August Macke

(German, 1887–1914)

August Macke was a German Expressionist painter who utilized a combination of simplified forms and patchwork colors to produce vibrant landscapes, portraits, and figurative scenes. “What I most cherish is the observation of the movement of colors,” he once said. “Only in this have I found the laws of those simultaneous and complementary color contrasts that nourish the actual rhythm of my vision.” Born on January 3, 1887 in Meschede, Germany, he went on to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, and later with Lovis Corinth in Berlin. Macke’s transition from muted realism to the brightly colored Cubist forms seen in his work Woman in a Green Jacket (1913), is likely attributable to his meeting Robert Delaunay in France. He was notably a founding member of the Der Blaue Reiter group while he was living in Munich. Other members of the group included Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Franz Marc, Paul Klee, and Gabriele Münter. Macke died in combat while serving in World War I, on September 26, 1914 in Champagne, France. Today, his works are in the collections of the Albertina in Vienna, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum Kunst Palast in Düsseldorf, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the August-Macke-Haus in Bonn, Germany, among others.