August Macke

Drei Frauen am Tisch bei der Lampe, painted in 1912, is a wonderful example of August Macke’s love of brilliant colour and simplified form. The glowing yellow of the table top, the floating green background and the warm pinks and reds help understand why Franz Marc addressed his friend with the very appropriate appelation August Vonderfarbe (August ‘From-the-Colour’) in a letter of 1911.

In February 1910 Macke visited an exhibition at the Galerie Thannhauser in Munich that included landscape paintings by Matisse, and in September 1910 he saw works by the Fauves and the colourful paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky and Gabriele Münter at the Zweite Ausstellung der Neuen Künstlervereinigung in Munich (fig. 1). These left a profound impact on Macke, who integrated their approach to colour in his own work. In 1910, the painter also saw Matisse’s Nature morte aux asphodels of 1907 in the collection of Karl Ernst Osthaus in Hagen which also had a major impact on him and his art. Between 1910 and 1912 the artist’s preoccupation shifted towards representations of everyday objects. Although he was thematically treating more traditional themes his formal conceptions underwent increasing stylistic transformation.

Indeed, Macke’s pictures executed in those years have a monumentality and colourism new to his œuvre. The artist began to develop a more dramatic approach to perspective, flattening his recession and using broad colour planes, very much in keeping with Matisse’s experiments of the same period. The present work, an intimate portrayal of three women seated round a table, is not only indebted to Matisse, but clearly evokes themes visited by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists alike. Macke’s first encounter with French Impressionism was during a visit to Paris in the summer of 1907, and during his subsequent stay in 1908 he became preoccupied with Cézanne, Gauguin and Seurat. The French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists treated the subject of people around a table frequently. For example, Claude Monet had painted a few intimate works of a family seated around a dinner table in 1868-69 in Le Diner (fig. 2) in which details such as the facial expressions and poses are sacrificed to the study of light and shadow. The dazzling white of the table lamp in Macke’s composition of Drei Frauen am Tisch bei der Lampe appears to be reminiscent of the glowing hanging lamp at the centre of Monet’s work. The sitters in the present work are depicted in more subdued tones apart from the white of the newspaper and cloth. The light and brilliance of colour is reserved for the still life on the table.

After the birth of Macke’s son Walter in April 1910, the painter started focusing more on the mother-and-child theme and intimate interior scenes similar to those of the Nabi artists. As with Pierre Bonnard’s Le Déjeuner of 1899 (fig. 3), we see Macke searching for new ways to turn a table into the key element of the composition. Emulating Bonnard’s composition the bright surface of the table is viewed from above, seen as broad chromatic fields of equal value so that planes and volumes correspond to each other without any indication of depth. The brushstrokes are bold and uninhibited. Familiar with Cézanne’s still lifes Macke revisits the close-up focus in the present work by bringing the gas lamp, bottle and bowl to the foreground, and like Cézanne in his still lifes he concentrates on the depiction of everyday household objects (fig. 4).

The present work is a wonderful example of Macke’s modern approach to painting dating from one of the most important and innovative periods of 20^th century art. Drei Frauen am Tisch bei der Lampe shows the wide and varied influences on the development of German Expressionist art and the work of August Macke, who was one of the foremost artists of the avant-garde movement in Germany and closely associated with the Blaue Reiter group.

FIG. 1, Alexej von Jawlensky, Stilleben mit gelber Decke, circa 1910, oil on board, Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden
FIG. 2, Claude Monet, Le Diner, 1868-69, oil on canvas, E.G. Bührle Foundation Collection, Zurich
FIG. 3, Pierre Bonnard, Le Déjeuner or Femmes assises, 1899, oil on canvas, E.G. Bührle Foundation Collection, Zurich
FIG. 4, Paul Cézanne, Nature morte: pot à lait et fruits, circa 1900, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.