Collection: Art prints by August Macke

August Macke was a German painter and is considered one of the most talented and colorful representatives of German Expressionism and a member of the artist group "Der Blaue Reiter", to which he belonged, however, with his own, brighter and more life-affirming visual language than many of his companions. He was born in Meschede in the Sauerland region in 1887 and showed exceptional artistic talent at an early age, which led him to the Düsseldorf Art Academy and later to Munich, where he met Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc and joined the Blue Rider circle. He was decisively influenced by several trips to Paris, during which he became acquainted with the works of the Fauves and in particular Robert Delaunay's orphistic color theory, which liberated and intensified his own color language.

Macke developed an early preference for the pulsating life of the modern city and the carefree world of bourgeois leisure activities. Walkers in parks, elegantly dressed women in front of hat stores, children by the pond, visitors to zoos and variety theaters - these motifs of everyday urban life were the focus of his work and clearly distinguish him from the spiritual and worldly tendencies of some Expressionists. He was not interested in inner turmoil or existential angst, but in the beauty and vitality of the present moment, which he captured in bright colors and clear, rhythmic forms. This brightness and joie de vivre lend his work an immediacy and accessibility that made it accessible to a wide audience from the very beginning.

From 1912 onwards, Macke's development as a painter intensified considerably. A central feature of his mature work is the masterful combination of colorful luminosity and compositional clarity, which lends his paintings a freshness and harmony that is almost unique in German Expressionism. His trip to Tunis in April 1914, which he undertook together with Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet, marked the high point of his development: the light and the world of color in North Africa sparked a final, intense creative phase in which color and light achieved a freedom and luminosity that brought his paintings close to abstraction without ever losing contact with the visible world. The watercolors and paintings of these last months are among the most precious testimonies to German modernism.

In addition to his work as a painter, Macke was a sociable, fun-loving and communicative personality who played a unifying and balancing role in the Blue Rider circle. His friendship with Franz Marc was particularly close and fruitful, and the exchange of letters between the two artists is one of the most revealing documents of the German avant-garde. August Macke fell in Champagne in September 1914, just a few weeks after the outbreak of the First World War, at the age of twenty-seven. Today he is regarded as one of the most radiant and tragic figures of German modernism, whose works are represented in the most important German museums and are highly valued on the international art market, while his early demise is considered one of the most painful losses inflicted on European art history by the First World War.