Explore August Macke prints by one of the leading artists associated with Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). Macke transformed parks, shop windows, cafés, gardens and figures at leisure through brilliant colour, simplified forms and a distinctive sense of harmony.
Discover works including Lady in the Green Jacket, Hat Shop, Market in Tunis and Three Girls in Yellow Straw Hats, available as fine art prints, framed prints and canvas panels.
August Macke created some of the brightest and most immediately appealing paintings associated with German Expressionism.
Where many Expressionist artists explored anxiety, psychological tension or the alienation of modern city life, Macke frequently painted a more harmonious world of parks, gardens, fashionable shops, cafés and people at leisure.
His figures are often simplified into broad shapes surrounded by brilliant colour. Faces may contain little detail, yet the relationships between people, clothing, trees, buildings and light give his paintings an unmistakable sense of life and movement.
Macke was closely associated with Der Blaue Reiter — The Blue Rider, but his highly individual style also absorbed influences from French Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and the colour experiments of Robert Delaunay.
Despite dying at only 27, Macke left a remarkably distinctive body of work that occupies an important place in the development of modern European painting.
August Robert Ludwig Macke was born in Germany in 1887.
He showed an early interest in art and studied in Düsseldorf before travelling widely and encountering many of the radical new approaches developing in European painting.
Visits to Paris exposed him to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism and, later, to the intense colour of Fauvism.
Macke did not simply adopt one modern style.
Instead, he absorbed the elements that interested him most and combined them with his own fascination with colour, light and everyday human activity.
His mature career developed extraordinarily quickly between approximately 1910 and 1914.
During these few years he created the colourful paintings of figures, parks, shops and landscapes for which he is now best known.
Macke became closely connected with the artistic circle surrounding Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc.
His friendship with Marc was particularly important.
In 1911, Kandinsky and Marc became the principal forces behind Der Blaue Reiter, an association of artists interested in expressive colour, spirituality, symbolism and new approaches to representation.
Macke participated in this artistic environment while retaining a distinctive visual identity.
Explore GalleryThane’s dedicated Der Blaue Reiter Prints collection for selected works by Macke alongside Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin.
You can also explore Macke within the wider development of Expressionist Art Prints.
August Macke demonstrates just how varied Expressionism could be.
Edvard Munch often explored anxiety and psychological conflict.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner transformed metropolitan life into angular, nervous compositions.
Franz Marc increasingly concentrated on symbolic animals and spiritual relationships with nature.
Macke’s paintings are frequently very different.
People stroll through parks.
Women examine fashionable clothes in shop windows.
Figures gather beneath trees.
Cafés, streets and gardens become arrangements of glowing colour.
There can be a sense of stillness and detachment, but Macke’s art generally lacks the deliberate psychological discomfort associated with some other Expressionists.
His contribution to Expressionism lies particularly in his liberation of colour and simplified form.
Colour is central to Macke’s work.
Rich blues, greens, reds, oranges and yellows are combined in clear areas that often appear to glow against one another.
He was interested in the way neighbouring colours could intensify each other and give a composition rhythm.
As his work developed, colour became progressively less dependent upon natural appearance.
Clothing, trees, shadows and buildings could be transformed according to the needs of the composition.
Yet Macke rarely abandoned the visible world completely.
Unlike Kandinsky, who moved rapidly towards abstraction, Macke usually retained recognisable people, streets and landscapes.
This balance between recognisable subject matter and increasingly independent colour is one of the defining characteristics of his work.
Lady in the Green Jacket, painted in 1913, is one of Macke’s most recognisable paintings.
A woman in a vivid green jacket dominates the composition, surrounded by other figures and richly coloured vegetation.
Details are simplified.
The figures are not conventional portraits and their individual identities are relatively unimportant.
Instead, Macke uses people almost as elements within a larger arrangement of colour and shape.
The brilliant green jacket provides a powerful focal point while surrounding blues, reds and yellows create an unusually harmonious image.
The painting is an excellent example of why Macke’s work remains so effective as wall art: strong colour is combined with a calm, balanced composition.
Macke was fascinated by the visual spectacle of modern consumer life.
Shop windows offered particularly rich possibilities.
Glass, reflections, mannequins, clothing, signs and pedestrians allowed him to build paintings from overlapping areas of colour and shape.
Works such as Fashion Store, Hat Shop and Shop Window transform ordinary shopping scenes into sophisticated modern compositions.
People frequently appear to observe goods through glass rather than directly interact with one another.
This gives the paintings an intriguing relationship between the viewer, the figures and the objects on display.
These subjects also firmly locate Macke within the modern European city of the early twentieth century.
Macke repeatedly painted people enjoying parks and gardens.
Rather than concentrating on specific personalities, he often reduced figures to simplified silhouettes or blocks of colour.
Their anonymity gives the paintings an almost universal quality.
People walk, sit, converse or simply occupy the landscape.
Trees and foliage provide large areas of green, while brightly coloured clothing introduces reds, blues and yellows.
These works combine modern social life with the traditional subject of landscape painting.
The result is neither conventional portraiture nor straightforward landscape, but a modern synthesis of people, colour and environment.
Three Girls in Yellow Straw Hats is characteristic of Macke’s ability to turn an apparently ordinary scene into a concentrated study of colour.
The figures are simplified and their yellow hats create a repeated visual rhythm across the composition.
Rather than depending on detailed facial expressions, Macke creates interest through posture, clothing and the relationships between neighbouring colours.
This reduction of detail allows the viewer to concentrate on the overall composition rather than individual identity.
August Macke and Franz Marc became close friends, although their paintings developed in noticeably different directions.
Marc increasingly devoted himself to animals and the spiritual symbolism of nature.
Macke remained fascinated by people and everyday modern life.
Marc’s blue horses, deer and tigers can feel symbolic and visionary.
Macke’s figures usually inhabit recognisable parks, streets, shops and cafés.
Colour nevertheless provided important common ground.
Both artists rejected the idea that colour should simply imitate nature and explored its ability to shape the emotional character of a painting.
Their friendship also placed Macke firmly within the creative network surrounding Der Blaue Reiter.
Another important influence was the French artist Robert Delaunay.
Delaunay explored how contrasting colours could generate rhythm, movement and visual energy.
Macke encountered these ideas during visits to Paris and incorporated aspects of them into his own painting.
The result can be seen in works where forms increasingly break into coloured planes while remaining connected with recognisable subjects.
Macke did not become a completely abstract painter.
Instead, he used modern colour theory to transform the world around him.
This ability to absorb radical new ideas without losing his own visual personality was one of his greatest strengths.
One of the most celebrated episodes in Macke’s career was his journey to Tunisia in April 1914.
He travelled with fellow artists Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet.
The brilliant North African light had an immediate effect on all three artists.
For Macke, architecture, markets, cafés, figures and landscape became opportunities to explore relationships between colour and light with extraordinary intensity.
Watercolours and paintings from the Tunisian journey are among the defining works of his final year.
Market in Tunis captures the distinctive visual experience of Macke’s North African journey.
Buildings, figures and market activity are simplified into blocks of luminous colour.
Rather than carefully describing every architectural or human detail, Macke concentrates on the relationships between forms.
The Tunisian works demonstrate how close he had come to creating paintings in which colour and structure could almost function independently of the original subject.
Macke’s Turkish Café works similarly transform an observed scene into an arrangement of colour and form.
Figures, architectural structures and surrounding spaces remain visible, but the composition is increasingly determined by areas of colour.
These works represent one of the clearest demonstrations of how Macke combined direct observation with modernist simplification.
Although Macke is particularly associated with figures and modern life, landscape remained important throughout his career.
Works depicting Tegernsee, Kandern, Lake Thun and other locations reveal his changing approach to nature.
Earlier landscapes retain stronger connections with Post-Impressionism.
Later paintings increasingly simplify buildings, trees, mountains and water into broader coloured areas.
Works such as Street with Church in Kandern, St Mary’s Church in the Snow and his Lake Thun subjects demonstrate how Macke adapted Expressionist colour to different environments.
Macke never abandoned recognisable subject matter in the way Kandinsky increasingly did.
Nevertheless, his mature work reveals a clear movement away from conventional naturalism.
Faces become simplified.
Bodies become blocks of colour.
Buildings are flattened.
Trees and landscapes are organised into rhythmic patterns.
In some paintings, the difference between figure and surrounding environment becomes increasingly dependent on colour rather than traditional modelling or perspective.
Macke therefore occupies an important position between figurative painting and the broader development of abstraction.
His work can be explored alongside related developments in GalleryThane’s Abstract Art Prints collection.
Macke’s relationship with Paul Klee became particularly important during their Tunisian journey.
Both artists were fascinated by colour, although their subsequent careers developed very differently.
For Klee, the journey became an important stage in the development of an increasingly personal and sometimes abstract visual language.
For Macke, it represented the culmination of experiments he had already been pursuing in Germany and Switzerland.
His Tunisian works suggest further developments that might have followed had his career continued.
The year 1914 was extraordinarily productive for Macke.
His Tunisian journey took place in the spring.
Only a few months later Europe descended into the First World War.
Macke was called into German military service and sent to the Western Front.
He was killed in France on 26 September 1914, only weeks after the beginning of the conflict.
He was 27 years old.
The loss was devastating to his friends and fellow artists, particularly Franz Marc.
Macke’s mature career had lasted only a few years, making the breadth and quality of his surviving work particularly remarkable.
Macke’s importance lies partly in the distinctive place he occupies within German Expressionism.
He demonstrated that expressive modern painting did not have to depend upon darkness, distortion or psychological anxiety.
His paintings could be luminous, harmonious and pleasurable while still radically transforming colour and form.
This makes his work an important counterpoint to some of the more confrontational strands of Expressionism.
His shop windows, fashionable figures, gardens and Tunisian scenes also provide a vivid record of modern life immediately before the First World War.
Today, Macke’s paintings remain among the most approachable and decorative works associated with Der Blaue Reiter.
Macke’s strong colour and relatively calm compositions make his paintings particularly versatile as wall art.
Lady in the Green Jacket can provide a vivid focal point in a living room, hallway or dining area.
His shop-window paintings work particularly well in contemporary interiors because their flattened forms and clear areas of colour can appear surprisingly modern.
Garden and park scenes introduce greens and softer natural tones while retaining flashes of stronger colour.
The Tunisian paintings are particularly effective where warmer yellows, oranges, reds and sunlit colours complement the surrounding interior.
Macke prints can work well with contemporary, mid-century modern, Scandinavian-inspired and eclectic interiors.
For one of Macke’s most recognisable figure paintings, consider Lady in the Green Jacket.
For modern urban subjects, explore Fashion Store, Hat Shop and Shop Window.
For brilliant colour and North African light, look at Market in Tunis or Turkish Café.
For landscapes, works such as Street with Church in Kandern provide a different view of Macke’s development.
Print size should reflect both the composition and the available wall space.
A larger Macke print can create a strong focal point above a sofa or sideboard, while smaller framed works can be combined with Franz Marc, Kandinsky or other Expressionist prints as part of a gallery wall.
GalleryThane August Macke artworks are available as fine art prints, framed prints and canvas panels in a range of sizes.
Fine art paper prints provide flexibility if you already have a particular frame or presentation in mind.
Framed August Macke prints offer a complete gallery-style presentation and work particularly well with his strongly coloured compositions.
Canvas panels provide a clean, ready-to-hang alternative that emphasises the colour and painterly character of the original artwork.
GalleryThane prints, frames and canvas panels are produced in our Nottinghamshire workshop using carefully selected fine art papers, pigment inks and framing materials.
Explore Der Blaue Reiter Prints for selected works by August Macke alongside Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, Alexej von Jawlensky and Marianne von Werefkin.
Discover the wider development of the movement in Expressionist Art Prints.
For modern art moving progressively towards simplified and non-representational form, explore Abstract Art Prints.
August Macke was a German Expressionist painter closely associated with Der Blaue Reiter. He is particularly known for his brilliantly coloured paintings of parks, shops, cafés, gardens, landscapes and people at leisure.
Yes. Macke was closely associated with the Blue Rider circle and with artists including Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky.
Macke is famous for his use of brilliant colour and simplified forms in paintings of modern everyday life, including shop windows, parks, fashionable figures and cafés.
Well-known Macke works include Lady in the Green Jacket, Hat Shop, Market in Tunis and numerous paintings of shops, gardens and figures at leisure.
Macke was deeply interested in colour theory and absorbed influences from Fauvism, Robert Delaunay and other European modernists. He increasingly used colour for compositional and expressive purposes rather than simply reproducing natural appearances.
Yes. Macke travelled to Tunisia with Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet in April 1914. The intense North African light had an important effect on his final paintings and watercolours.
Both were associated with Der Blaue Reiter and shared an interest in expressive colour. Marc concentrated heavily on symbolic animal subjects, while Macke frequently painted people, shops, parks, cafés and scenes of modern leisure.
Macke generally retained recognisable subjects, but his later paintings increasingly simplified figures and landscapes into areas of colour and form. His work therefore contributed to the broader movement away from naturalism towards abstraction.
Macke was only 27 when he was killed during the First World War in September 1914.
Yes. His vivid colour, simplified forms and balanced compositions work particularly well in contemporary, mid-century, Scandinavian-inspired and eclectic interiors.
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