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August Macke (January 3, 1887 – September
26, 1914) was one of the leading members of the
German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The
Blue Rider). He lived during a particularly
innovative time for German art which saw the
development of the main German Expressionist
movements as well as the arrival of the successive
avant-garde movements which were forming in the
rest of Europe. Like a true artist of his time,
Macke knew how to integrate into his painting the
elements of the avant-garde which most interested
him.

Macke lived most of his creative life in Bonn,
with the exception of a few periods spent at Lake
Thun in Switzerland and various trips to Paris,
Italy, Holland and Tunisia. In Paris, where he
travelled for the first time in 1907, Macke saw
the work of the Impressionists, and shortly after
he went to Berlin and spent a few months in Lovis
Corinth's studio. His style was formed within the
mode of French Impressionism and
Post-impressionism and later went through a
Fauvism|Fauve period. In 1910, through his
friendship with Franz Marc, Macke met Kandinsky
and for a while shared the non-objective aesthetic
and the mystical and symbolic interests of Der
blaue Reiter.

Macke's meeting with Robert Delaunay in Paris in
1912 was to be a sort of revelation for him.
Delaunay's chromatic Cubism, which Guillaume
Apollinaire|Apollinaire had called Orphism,
influenced Macke's art from that point onwards.
His Shops Windows can be considered a personal
interpretation of Delaunay's Windows, combined
with the simultaneity of images found in Italian
Futurism (art)|Futurism. The exotic atmosphere of
Tunisia, where Macke travelled in 1914 with Paul
Klee and Louis Moillet was fundamental for the
creation of the luminist approach of his final
period, during which he produced a series of works
now considered masterpieces.
Macke's career was cut short by his early death at
the front in World War I in September 1914.
commonscat|August Macke