Spaziergang im Park

'We painters know that without his harmonies, whole octaves of colour will disappear from German art, and the sounds of the colours remaining will become duller and sharper. He gave a brighter and purer sound to colour than any of us; he gave it the clarity and brightness of his whole being' (Franz Marc, Eulogy to August Macke (1914), cited in A. Meseure, August Macke, Cologne, 2000, p. 92)

Spaziergang im Park (Walking in the Park) is one of a large number of works that Macke made in a burst of creativity in the summer of 1914. Exhibiting all the cohesion and subtle harmony of colour, form and tone that distinguishes Macke's mature painting and taking as its subject one of the artist's favourite themes, this gouache is one of a series of works that depict city life as a harmonious and civilized idyll.

In the summer of 1914 Macke was at the height of his powers. At the beginning of the year his paintings of people walking in the parks and gardens from Hilterfingen had attained new heights of pictorial synthesis and demonstrated his full absorption and development beyond the earlier influence of Delaunay who he and Franz Marc had first met in 1912. In June Macke returned to Bonn after having spent over two months with Klee in Tunisia where his art had taken another step forward and awoken Macke to even further painterly possibilities. On his return to Bonn, Macke's wife Elizabeth wrote, 'He plunged into his work with great zeal... It is almost impossible to imagine how he managed to paint so many of his best pictures in such a short space of time. He seemed to work in a frenzy, in a fever, as if he were trying to get as much done as possible of the work he had set for himself.' (Elizabeth Macke cited in Anna Meseure, August Macke, Cologne, 2000, p. 87)

By this stage in Macke's career, the subject matter of his work had become merely a vehicle for the expression of his concept of the world as a harmonious 'earthly paradise', that he described as 'nature imbued with joy'. This idealistic almost utopian vision of the world was something that Macke believed could be mirrored in painting through a simple harmonious correspondence between form and colour. 'Even in the games of children,' he wrote, 'even in the hat of a cocotte, in our joy at a sunny day, invisible ideas gently assume material form.' Macke declared. (Ibid, p. 88) Like Seurat's portraits of the Paris bourgeoisie enjoying their Sunday off Spaziergang im Park is a very strictly ordered work relying on a carefully orchestrated balance of form between figure and landscape, shape and colour. Almost devoid of personality, Macke's anonymous city dwellers punctuate and articulate the gentle landscape without disturbing it. Built in such a way as to convey a deep sense of the harmonious union between all the elements of the work, the world that Macke describes in these late works is a highly idealized one of peace and serenity. It is a vision of a world in which man and nature integrate in perfect accord - a world which, within only a few weeks of this picture being painted, was to be lost forever.

The present work is little known. It was purchased by the father of the present owner in the 1920s and has only been exhibited publically on one occassion when it was lent to the celebrated retrospective of Macke's work held at the Wesrfälischer Kunstverein in 1957, some 50 years ago.