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If the Expressionism of the Die Brücke artists, which might be called Northern Expressionism, attempted to depict the artist's subjectivity, Southern Expressionism, to which Macke belonged, was far more sensual and more closely linked to French art. For a short period of time Macke shared the non objective aesthetic and the mystical and symbolic interests of the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) group -formed in Munich in 1911 around Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc- but he soon turned again to the visible world, although without ever losing his interest in the expressive value of pure colours and their relation with musical values.
The present painting, which employs a post Cubist pictorial language close to Delaunay's Orphism, shows the strong influence of that artist on Macke following their meeting in Paris in 1912. The canvases of the roof of the big top and the posts which support them are broken up into a chromatic Cubism which deconstructs the form through light and transforms the construction of the image into a transparent chromatic structure. The luminous colour, characteristic of all of Macke's work, creates a brilliant and unreal atmosphere which accentuates the unsettling pathos of the scene.
With this painting and the closely connected The Tightrope Walker of 1914 (Kunstmuseum, Bonn) Macke revived the theme of the circus. This subject had already interested other artists, particularly Impressionist and Expressionist painters, due to its colour, brilliant lighting and also perhaps because it represented an alternative world which went against established norms. Macke's interest in circus themes in the autumn of 1913 and the summer of 1914 can be related -as Peter Vergo has noted (1992)- with his move to Hilterfingen in Switzerland in the shores of Lake Thun. There, according to Elisabeth Macke, a family of circus artists called Knie performed in the market square, their pirouettes on a wire particularly striking both her and her husband: "[it was] an unusual spectacle in richly contrasting colours such as one rarely sees. It all made a deep artistic impression on August, who translated these experiences in masterly fashion into numerous drawings and paintings."
However, in the present painting an accident to the horserider in the ring constitutes a more dramatic scene in which pain and death have replaced the performance itself as the principal protagonists. Painted a few years before his early death at the Front, the painting is an exception in Macke's oeuvre, which was always characterised by a cheerful and agreeable mood. Macke had already made a first version of this subject, possibly based on a real incident, in the small gouache entitled Fall, dated 1911, and a slightly earlier charcoal drawing.
Ursula Heiderich (1998) has seen in these compositions the revival of the traditional theme of the Pietà, indicating Macke's continuing interest in the great artists of the past. Like a dead Christ, the body of the young circus rider who has just fallen from her horse, is held up by a grief stricken group of acrobats, whose features and expressions Macke has obliterated as if they were dissolved into light. According to Heiderich the scene symbolises "the idea of danger as part of life on the fringes of society, as usually lived by artists."
Paloma Alarcó
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