August Macke (1887-1914)

Sponsored by Banco Urquijo, the exhibition August Macke (1887-1914) opened on 18 March, organised in collaboration with the Westfälisches Landesmuseum in Münster, where a few months before a selection of one hundred watercolours by the artist had been presented. Next to these works, the Spanish public could admire a group of oils from the different creative periods of the painter: this made the exhibition the first important one dedicated to August Macke outside Germany. As one of the leading members of the German expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), Macke, whose career was prematurely truncated by the First World War, centred his attention mainly on the expressive value of pure colours and their relation with musical values. His pictorial work shows the influence of the French post-impressionism, and especially of fauvism and of Picasso and Braque’s analytical cubism, as well as of the dispersion of shapes typical of Italian futurism and the “simultaneous contrasts” of Delaunay’s orphism.