Works by August Macke

August Macke painted people under trees and at shop windows in broad patches of bright colour, until he died at the front in France in September 1914, aged 27.

The first pictures that stayed with him as a boy were drawings by his father, Japanese prints owned by a friend's father, and paintings by Arnold Böcklin, seen in Basel in 1900. Paris showed him the Impressionists in 1907, and soon after he spent a few months in Lovis Corinth's Berlin studio. In Portrait with Apples of 1909, the year he married her, his wife Elisabeth holds a white plate of fruit between a dark wall and a yellow curtain.

Through Franz Marc he met Kandinsky in 1910 and for a while shared the Blaue Reiter's leaning toward the abstract and the mystical. Meeting Robert Delaunay in Paris in 1912 came as a kind of revelation, and Delaunay's colour-driven Cubism shaped his work from then on. His shop-window pictures can be read as an answer to Delaunay's Windows: in Woman with Parasol in front of Milliner's Shop, of 1914, a woman in red with an orange parasol stands before hats on stands, the window broken into pale squares.

His last five years account for most of the works below, nearly all paintings. In April 1914 he went to Tunisia with Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet, and the trip shaped the light-filled style of his last months. Turkish Café, painted on plywood that year, sets a yellow chair, a small red table with a cup and carafe, and a seated figure in green against an orange arch, under hanging leaves.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, Alte Nationalgalerie, Lenbachhaus, Museum Folkwang.