August Macke – Looking at German Expressionism Artist August Macke
August Macke (1887–1914) was a German Expressionist painter and an important participant in Der Blaue Reiter. In a career of barely a decade, he developed a luminous style built from simplified figures, rhythmic outlines, and saturated color. His best-known paintings and watercolors transform parks, shopwindows, zoos, family portraits, and the light of Tunisia into calm scenes of modern life. Macke absorbed ideas from Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, and Robert Delaunay’s color experiments without surrendering recognizable subjects. He was killed in action in France at age 27, soon after World War I began.
Who Was August Macke?
August Macke is known for bright color, firm contour, and figures simplified almost to silhouettes. His paintings remain legible as scenes of everyday life, yet color and shape carry as much weight as narrative detail. Across oils, watercolors, drawings, prints, and applied designs, he repeatedly explored how people move through public space.
August Macke’s calm images range from intimate portrait art and landscapes to modern scenes of promenades, shopwindows, cafés, and zoological gardens.
Macke belongs to German Expressionism, but his art often differs from the movement’s more anxious imagery. He translated the visual languages of his time into a personal, representational art of color and light. That ability to connect recognizable experience with increasingly autonomous color made him an important figure in the history leading toward contemporary art.
| Nationality | German |
| Birthdate | 3 January 1887 |
| Birthplace | Meschede, Germany |
| Date of Death | 26 September 1914 |
| Associated Movements | German Expressionism, Der Blaue Reiter |
August Macke Biography and Artistic Development
August Macke was closely involved with the editorial circle and exhibitions of Der Blaue Reiter, the Munich-based network associated with major changes in the German art world before World War I. It is more accurate to call him a leading participant than a founder of a fixed artists’ association: the Blue Rider was a fluid exhibition and publication project led by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Macke’s participation was brief but consequential, and his independent Rhineland activity remained equally important to his career.
Early Life and Education
August Robert Ludwig Macke was born on January 3, 1887, in Meschede, Westphalia. His father, August Friedrich Macke, was a civil engineer and amateur artist; his mother was Maria Florentine Macke. The family soon moved to Cologne, where Macke befriended the future painter Hans Thuar. Drawing interested him more than conventional schoolwork.
Family sketches, Japanese prints in the Thuar household, and museum visits gave Macke an unusually broad visual education before formal training began.
In 1900, the family moved to Bonn. There Macke met Walter Gerhardt and Walter’s sister Elisabeth, whom he married in 1909. Bonn became his principal home and later the center of his activity among the Rhineland Expressionists.
In 1904, Macke entered the Royal Art Academy in Düsseldorf. He soon found its academic routine restrictive and also attended evening classes at the city’s School of Applied Arts, where he could experiment more freely with drawing, painting, printmaking, and design. Work on stage sets and costumes for the Düsseldorf theater widened his understanding of figures moving through constructed space.
Macke left the academy in 1906 and traveled in Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain, Italy, and France during the following years. The collector Bernhard Koehler, Elisabeth’s uncle, supported several of these journeys and became an important patron. Travel exposed Macke to both museum collections and the newest European art.
Paris, Berlin, and Artistic Training
Macke made his first trip to Paris in 1907, and returned several times. Early visits introduced him to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, especially the work of Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Georges Seurat. Later encounters brought the lessons of Cubism and Robert Delaunay’s color structures into view.
In Paris, Macke encountered Fauvism, Cubism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism as living alternatives to academic instruction.
In 1907 and 1908, Macke also studied for a time in Berlin with Lovis Corinth, whose direct handling of paint offered another route beyond Düsseldorf academicism. After completing military service, he married Elisabeth Gerhardt in Bonn in 1909. Works such as Portrait of the Artist’s Wife with a Blue Hat (1909) combine affectionate observation with growing confidence in simplified form and strong color.
August Macke and Der Blaue Reiter
Macke met Wassily Kandinsky and other Munich artists after beginning his close friendship with Franz Marc in 1910. Marc and Kandinsky led the Blue Rider’s almanac and first exhibition, while artists including Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky, Heinrich Campendonk, Paul Klee, and Macke contributed in different ways.
The Blue Rider was not a stable club with a definitive five-person membership. Its exhibitions deliberately placed artists with different nationalities and styles in dialogue. Macke showed three works in the first exhibition in Munich in late 1911 and participated in the second, graphics-focused exhibition in 1912. Paintings such as Staudacher’s House at the Tegernsee and Tegernsee Landscape (both 1910) record the landscape in broad, newly saturated planes.
The artists around Der Blaue Reiter did not share a single technique, but they challenged naturalistic color and academic hierarchies. Their exhibition project connected modern European experiments with medieval, folk, children’s, African, Asian, and Oceanic art, though its treatment of non-European cultures reflected the unequal colonial assumptions of the period.
Where analytic Cubism often limited its palettes to browns and grays to investigate form, Blue Rider artists made expressive and symbolic color a central field of inquiry.
Macke learned from Cubism and Futurism, but his figures and objects generally remained recognizable. His contribution to the circle lay in showing that modern color could reorganize ordinary experience without eliminating it.
The Blue Rider Almanac appeared in 1912, financed substantially by Bernhard Koehler and edited by Kandinsky and Marc. Macke assembled visual material and contributed the essay “Masks,” which considered the shared expressive force he perceived across many cultures and kinds of image. In 1913, he helped organize the Exhibition of Rhenish Expressionists in Bonn and participated in Herwarth Walden’s First German Autumn Salon in Berlin.
Macke’s 1912 visit to Robert Delaunay in Paris decisively expanded his understanding of color as a structure rather than a surface decoration.
Delaunay’s interlocking color contrasts, associated with Orphism, offered Macke a way to combine movement, light, and geometry. In Large Bright Shop Window (1912), reflections, objects, lettering, and figures overlap in a shallow field. Macke adapted Delaunay’s example to a familiar urban subject and combined it with the suggestion of motion found in Italian Futurism.
The second and final Blue Rider exhibition opened at Galerie Hans Goltz in Munich in February 1912 and focused on works on paper. Its broad international selection confirmed that the project was a forum rather than a uniform school. Macke could therefore participate while disagreeing with parts of Kandinsky’s program and pursuing his own Rhineland network.
For Macke, the Blue Rider mattered most as an exchange of ideas about color, form, and the possibilities of modern art.
Kandinsky pursued abstraction and compared color harmony to music; Macke remained more invested in the visible world. The difference is revealing. In his strongest pictures, a hat, tree, shopwindow, or walking figure is still identifiable, yet its color participates in an independent rhythm across the surface.
August Macke’s Painting Style and Subjects
Macke valued his exchange with Kandinsky but was skeptical of some of the metaphysical claims surrounding Kandinsky’s abstract painting. His own work usually remained representational. Cubist compression, Delaunay’s chromatic contrasts, and the speed of Futurist composition became tools for organizing scenes rather than ends in themselves.
Macke’s mature style joins simplified form to luminous color while preserving the pleasure and ambiguity of ordinary modern life.
His recurring subjects include strolling couples, fashionably dressed women, children, gardens, zoos, bridges, cafés, and shopwindows. Promenade and People by a Blue Lake (both 1913) reduce faces to nearly blank shapes. Individual identity gives way to posture, clothing, color, and the shared rhythm of people in a landscape.
Macke often chose spaces in which modern people could look without being compelled to act: parks, riverbanks, promenades, zoos, and shop displays. Windows, fences, trees, and clothing divide the compositions into color zones. The frequent absence of facial detail makes looking itself—at goods, animals, scenery, or other people—the real subject.
At the Cologne Zoo and other zoological gardens, Macke found a bourgeois paradise where animals, vegetation, and visitors could be woven into a single decorative rhythm.
These scenes can appear idyllic, but they are also shaped by modern consumer culture and by period ideas about nature and the “exotic.” Macke’s zoos and Tunisian subjects belong to a Europe marked by colonial collecting, tourism, and unequal representations. Recognizing that context does not cancel their formal achievement; it clarifies the historical world in which their beauty was produced.
Turquoise, violet, red, green, and yellow do more than describe sunlight: their repeated contrasts establish the visual pace of Macke’s paintings.
Color, Orphism, and Increasing Abstraction
Delaunay’s work encouraged Macke to test how far color and interlocking planes could carry a composition. Colored Composition (1912), Colored Forms I (1913), and Colored Forms II (1913) move close to abstraction while retaining echoes of observed structure. These experiments sharpened the organization of his figurative pictures rather than replacing them.
Macke brought this chromatic structure back into pictures of people and places. In 1913, he organized the Exhibition of Rhenish Expressionists in Bonn and showed work at the First German Autumn Salon in Berlin, two important fine art events that connected his regional friendships to the European avant-garde. Later that year, the family moved to a rented house in Hilterfingen on Lake Thun. The mountains, lake, gardens, and figures there became the setting for some of his most resolved paintings.
The Tunisia Journey of 1914
In April 1914, Macke traveled through Tunisia with Paul Klee and the Swiss painter Louis Moilliet. Over nearly two weeks, they visited Tunis, Carthage, Sidi Bou Saïd, Hammamet, Saint-Germain, and Kairouan. Architecture, strong light, vegetation, markets, cafés, and street life offered Macke a dense field in which observed space could be rebuilt through transparent color.
During the trip, Macke produced 33 watercolors and 79 drawings in three sketchbooks—an extraordinary concentration of work in less than two weeks.
The Tunisia journey was a culmination rather than a sudden conversion to color. Macke was already an accomplished watercolorist, and Klee learned from both Macke and Moilliet even as all three responded differently to the same places. Macke used transparent washes, white paper, and geometric divisions to make architecture and sunlight inseparable.
The Tunisia watercolors join the saturated color of Fauvism and Expressionism to Cubist structure while remaining grounded in streets, buildings, people, and landscape.
The pictures should also be read within the colonial setting of French-ruled Tunisia and the conventions through which European travelers represented North Africa. Macke’s formal discoveries are real, but so is the unequal historical framework surrounding the journey.
World War I began only months after Macke returned. He was called to military service in early August 1914 and killed in action south of Perthes-lès-Hurlus in Champagne on September 26, at age 27. His friend Franz Marc mourned him in a moving obituary and was himself killed at Verdun in 1916. Macke’s death ended one of the most concentrated careers in early German modernism.
Famous August Macke Paintings and Artworks
Across his short career, Macke combined Fauvism, Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism into a style distinguished by clear contour and harmonized color. Unlike many artists associated with Die Brücke, he generally avoided jagged distortion and psychological tension. The following groups show the range of August Macke’s artworks rather than a strict ranking.
Major August Macke paintings are held by museums and art galleries including the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Lenbachhaus in Munich, LWL-Museum in Münster, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Notable landscapes include:
- Garden View (1911)
- The Church of St. Mary in Bonn in Snow (1911)
Portraits and figure studies reveal Macke’s close attention to pose and color:
- Portrait of the Artist’s Wife with a Hat (1909)
- Nude with Coral Necklace (1910)
His best-known scenes of modern life include:
- Zoological Garden I (1912), which interweaves visitors, foliage, birds, and fences
- Promenade (1913), a poised arrangement of faceless walkers beneath trees
- Hat Shop (1913), where display, reflection, and fashion structure the image
- Turkish Café (1914), a late synthesis of figure, architecture, and radiant color
Macke also worked beyond oil painting. He made watercolors, drawings, woodcuts, linocuts, woodcarvings, ceramics, and designs for textiles and decorative objects. Examples include:
- Farewell (1914), an ominous crowd scene painted after war began
- Three Nudes (1913), an oil painting closely related to his exploration of simplified bodies
- Designs for embroidery, carpets, wall hangings, and tapestries, some later executed by Elisabeth Macke.
Further Reading
August Macke’s career was brief, but his surviving letters, sketchbooks, watercolors, paintings, and applied designs support a large scholarly literature. These books provide focused ways to learn more about the German painter, especially his Swiss period and his rapid stylistic development.
August Macke and Switzerland (2013), Edited by Helen Hirsch and Klara Drenker-Nagels
This bilingual exhibition catalogue focuses on Macke’s residence at Rosengarten House in Hilterfingen from October 1913 to June 1914. Essays and numerous reproductions show how the landscape around Lake Thun became both a recurring subject and a framework for a mature synthesis of figure, color, and space.
Published by Hatje Cantz for exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Thun and August Macke Haus Bonn, the volume includes contributions by several scholars rather than a single-author text. It also considers the Tunisia journey planned during the Swiss period and Macke’s artistic exchange with Louis Moilliet. The book is particularly useful for readers interested in place, travel, and the formation of Macke’s late style.
- Looking at August Macke's time in Switzerland from 1913 to 1914
- The first publication to shed light on Macke’s affinity for Switzerland
- A revealing overview of how a place can inform an artist's style
August Macke (Mega Square) Kindle Edition by Walter Cohen
Walter Cohen’s compact illustrated survey offers a concise introduction to Macke’s biography and major themes. It is most useful as an accessible overview rather than a catalogue raisonné. The reproductions move from portraits and Bonn landscapes to shopwindows, railway scenes, and Tunisian subjects, allowing readers to follow the artist’s increasingly simplified forms and intensified color across a very short career.
- Examining the brief life of German Expressionism artist August Macke
- A compelling text of an artist whose career was cut short
- Superb artistic reproductions of Macke's finest artworks
August Macke’s achievement lies in turning the avant-garde languages of his time into an art that is recognizably his own. His strongest images hold observation and abstraction in balance: people remain present, but color, contour, and interval determine how their world feels.
Neue Galerie New York’s curatorial video Franz Marc and August Macke: 1909–1914 introduces the artists’ friendship and its role in the development of German Expressionism.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Style Were August Macke’s Paintings?
August Macke’s paintings combine German Expressionism with lessons from Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, and Robert Delaunay’s Orphism. His mature work remains figurative but simplifies bodies, architecture, and landscape into outlined color areas. He favored calm scenes of modern leisure—promenades, gardens, zoos, cafés, shopwindows, and family life—rather than the psychological tension associated with some Expressionist art. Color creates structure, rhythm, and light rather than merely describing local appearance.
What Was the Der Blaue Reiter Group?
Der Blaue Reiter, or the Blue Rider, was a fluid exhibition and publication project formed in Munich around Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc in 1911. It was not a conventional association with fixed membership or one shared style. Its artists explored expressive color, abstraction, music, folk and children’s art, and works from many cultures. August Macke participated in both exhibitions and contributed the essay “Masks” to the 1912 Blue Rider Almanac.
How Did August Macke Die?
August Macke was called into the German army after World War I began in August 1914. He was killed in action south of Perthes-lès-Hurlus in Champagne, France, on September 26, 1914, at age 27. The death came less than six months after his productive Tunisia journey. His close friend Franz Marc wrote an obituary mourning the loss and was himself killed at Verdun in 1916.
Why Is August Macke Important to German Expressionism?
August Macke expanded German Expressionism by showing how intense, non-naturalistic color could organize recognizable scenes of everyday life. His parks, shopwindows, zoos, portraits, and Tunisian watercolors balance observation with increasingly independent color and form. He also connected the Munich Blue Rider circle with artists in the Rhineland, organized a major Bonn exhibition in 1913, and absorbed French avant-garde ideas into a distinct style before his death at 27.
Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.
Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.
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Cite this Article
Isabella, Meyer, “August Macke – Looking at German Expressionism Artist August Macke.” Art in Context. December 5, 2021. URL: https://artincontext.org/august-macke/
Meyer, I. (2021, 5 December). August Macke – Looking at German Expressionism Artist August Macke. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/august-macke/
Meyer, Isabella. “August Macke – Looking at German Expressionism Artist August Macke.” Art in Context, December 5, 2021. https://artincontext.org/august-macke/.
