“The great magic of Macke’s art, the way it shifts between the pleasures of the eye and meditative serenity, unfolds now, more than in earlier years, in the quiet world of his leisured figures, in park scenes, on walks, before fashion stores.”
(Right) August Macke, Großes helles Schaufenster (Large Bright Shop Window), 1912, oil on canvas, Sprengel Museum, Hannover Image © De Agostini Picture Library / M. Carrieri / Bridgeman Images
Painted in Bonn in 1913, Studie zum hellen Schaufenster is an elegantly rendered depiction of one of August Macke’s most famous subject matters: humanity at one with the modern world. With her back to the viewer, a static point before a vibrant display of colour and form, the central figure recalls the motif of Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic wanderer. Although here the untamed wilderness of the nature is substituted for the ordered world of modern consumerism. Beauty for Macke could be found in the quotidian, and it is in depicting people at leisure that he best expresses the harmony between man and his social environment: ‘Macke seems to have countered the world’s confusion and lack of clarity with a belief in a meaningful order that was a precondition of man’s oneness with nature through its pleasurable perception. Nature, for Macke, is the natural locus of human beings – the social realm of life blends smoothly with nature, and vice versa’ (Volker Adolphs quoted in, Volker Adolphs & Annegret Hoberg, August Macke and Franz Marc: An Artist Friendship (exhibition catalogue), Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn & Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau, Munich, 2015, p. 15).
The geometric arrangement of planes and tonal warmth of Studie zum hellen Schaufenster blends colour theory with modern life. The non-descriptive colour palette reflects Macke’s involvement in Der Blaue Reiter group alongside Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. Macke mined the expressive potential of colour and distorted perspective in a style reminiscent of Cézanne.
Macke’s compositional fragmentation, evident in Studie zum hellen Schaufenster, also reveals the influence of Orphism, in particular of Robert Delaunay’s Fenêtre paintings. Macke was deeply impressed by Delaunay’s animated canvases and the way in which he relinquished representational form. Seeking to fuse his own stylistic ideas with those of Delaunay, Macke pushed further into the realm of abstraction. In his depictions of figures standing before bright shop windows, Macke conveys a perfect synthesis of Delaunay's ideas with his own.
“What chiefly preoccupied August Macke at this time was the dynamism of a picture, expressed not only in the formal division of space but above all in the interplay of colours against and among each other. Even in a uniformly, say, green area there must be no dead points; the colour must work, vibrate – live.”
In the present work the window is hinted at through prismatic angles of colour. The figure at the centre of the composition almost dissolves into the shifting planes surrounding her. This dynamism is heightened through an application of simultaneous colour contrasts in which the eye moves from one plane of colour to the next in a technique Macke would later describe as: ‘Finding these space-defining energies of colour’ (quoted in, V. Adolphs & A. Hoberg, ibid., p. 258). In Studie zum hellen Schaufenster the figurative hovers on the brink of abstraction demonstrating Macke’s innovative stylistic explorations and his important artistic legacy.
