Drei weibliche Akte

until summer 1904

Deciding to be an artist against his father’s wishes

August resolves to become an artist, but his gravely ill father is against it: he thinks the chosen profession cannot guarantee his son a stable income. August gets his way with the help of the father of his school friend Alfred Schütte and of Paul Clemen, then professor of art history at Bonn University, who has seen his work.

spring 1907

Farewell to Böcklin: Meier-Graefe’s book on the Impressionists

In spring 1907 Macke stays in Kandern with the sculptor Claus Zito and travels with him to Basel for exhibitions, where he buys the art historian Julius Meier-Graefe’s book on the French Impressionists, then almost unknown in Germany. His manner changes: he writes to Elisabeth that he cannot understand how he could depend for so long on the “sensual painting of Böcklin and Thoma”, and that he is freeing himself from them for good.

April 1914

Tunisia with Klee and Moilliet: landmark watercolours

In April 1914 Macke makes a two-week trip to Tunisia with Paul Klee and Klee’s school friend, the painter Louis Moilliet, and brings back a large number of landmark watercolours. The exotic atmosphere of Tunisia becomes fundamental to the luminist approach of his final period; the sketches and photographs will serve as material for “Tunisian Landscape”, “Landscape with Cows and a Camel” and other works, but Macke will not manage to use them fully.

8 August 1914

Mobilisation: to the front as a reservist

Almost immediately after the outbreak of the First World War, on 8 August 1914, Macke, a reservist, is called up for the front. Far, as Elisabeth wrote years later, from the “hurrah-patriotism” that seized many, he nevertheless considers it his duty to go; in his letters from the front he describes the horror and cruelty of the war.

26 September 1914

Killed in battle at twenty-seven

On the morning of 26 September 1914 Macke is killed in battle in Champagne at the age of 27; his remains are not found, and his name appears among those of other dead on a gravestone at the military cemetery at Souain (other accounts say he is buried in the German military cemetery at Souain-Perthes-lès-Hurlus). In one of his last letters he remarks that only the steadfastness of the defenders of the Western Front will spare Germany the devastation by war that the front-line regions of France have suffered.

26. September 1914

Died