August Macke

Born. 03.01.1887 in Meschede, Germany
Died. 26.09.1914 in Perthes-les-Hurlus, Champagne, France

German painter, expressionist

About the artist

August Robert Ludwig Macke was born on 3 January 1887, in Meschede, Germany. It was not long after his birth that the family moved to Cologne, where Macke was educated at the Kreuzgymnasium. When he was 13 the family moved again to Bonn where he became friends with Walter Gerhardt and Gerhardt’s sister, Elisabeth, whom he married in 1909. In 1904 Macke’s father died, and not long after his death, he enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he stayed for two years. During his studies, he travelled to North Italy,  the Netherlands, Belgium, and Britain.

In 1907 he went to Paris, where he was inspired by Impressionists. His style was formed within the mode of French Impressionism and Post-impressionism and later went through a Fauve period.

In 1910, through his friendship with Franz Marc, Macke met Kandinsky and shared the non-objective aesthetic and the mystical and symbolic interests of Der Blaue Reiter. As an expressionist painter, he was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group. Living during a developing active time for German art: he witnessed the German Expressionist movements as well as the avant-garde movements that were forming throughout Europe. Macke’s career was cut short by his early death in the second month of the First World War at the front in Champagne, France, on 26 September 1914.