Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza - Inicio

Author:

Morris Louis

Born/Dead:

Baltimore, 1912-Washington, 1962

Date:

Works

Biography

August Macke, one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), lived during a particularly innovative period for German art which witnessed the development of the main Expressionist trends and the gradual dissemination of the successive avant-garde movements from the rest of Europe. Like a true artist of his timeMacke, succeeded in integrating into his painting the aspects of the avant-garde that most interested him

Macke. began studying at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, although he was more attracted to the teachings of the Kunstgewerbeschule. He spent most of his creative life in Bonn, except for a few stays in Lake Thun in Switzerland and several trips to Paris, Italy, Holland and Tunisia. In Paris, which he first visited in 1907, he became acquainted with the work of the Impressionists and shortly afterwards he spent a few months at Lovis Corinth’s studio in Berlin. His artistic style initially fell within the orbit of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and later went through a Fauve period. In 1910 his friend Franz Marc introduced him to Wassily Kandinsky and other artists affiliated with the Munich Neue Künstlervereinigung, an association which he joined in 1911. That year he was invited by Marc and Kandinsky to exhibit alongside Der Blaue Reiter and to contribute to its almanac. This brought him into contact with the non-objective aesthetic and the mystic and symbolic concerns of the two artists

Meeting. Robert Delaunay in Paris in 1912 was a genuine revelation for Macke. The French artist’s chromatic Cubism, dubbed Orphism by Apollinaire, influenced his painting from that point onwardsMacke’s. Shop Windows can be considered a personal interpretation of Delaunay’s Windows combined with the simultaneity of images that charecterised Italian Futurism. The exotic atmosphere of Tunisia, where he travelled in 1914 with Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet, was a determining factor in shaping the Luminist aesthetic of his final period, during which he produced a series of works that are regarded as masterpieces of colour

His. career was cut short by his early death on the front during the First World War in September 1914