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Title: August Macke by Anna Meseure, Taschen Publishing ISBN: 3-8228-0671-4 Publisher: TASCHEN America Llc Pub. Date: 1993 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.99

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Introduction to one of the 20th c.'s great colourists
Comment: Auguste Macke was only 27 when he died in action in the first month of World War One, and is usually classed as an Expressionist because these are the type of paintings he was producing in the last months of his life. But as Anna Meseure's study demonstrates, Macke went through more and quicker changes of style than Picasso, moving every few months from Symbolism to Impressionism to Post-Impressionism to Fauvism to Cubism to the Blaue Reiter Group to Futurism to Orphism to Expressionism. In this intense metamorphosing over about six years, Macke is an index to the extraordinary modernist activity that exploded in the decade prior to World War 1. but whereas Picasso's need for change was driven by intense personal need, it is difficult to overcome the suspicion of dilettantism in Macke's work, this amiable son of the bourgeoisie; a painter who never faced the economic anguish of many artists, thanks to the generosity of his industrialist uncle-in-law; a man happiest in family life and provincial towns: a kind of gentleman amateur, someone blissfully unaware of a world hurtling towards an apocalyptic war. Even an epochal trip to Tunisia with Paul Klee, which resulted in his most celebrated work, only lasted a fortnight. Meseure encourages this conception by emphasising how Macke's encounters with radical cultural currents were always transformed by him in a reactionary way - so his urban scenes inspired by the visual fractures of Futurism become passive and contemplative, leaked of tension. although he contibuted to the first Blaue Reiter exhibition and its 'Almanac', he fundamentally disagreed with its figurehead Kandinsky.

There is some continuity in all this stylistic leap-frogging - the subject matter of the Impressionists (streets, cafes, parks etc.), the geometrical compositions of Cezanne, and, above all, the blazing colours of the Fauves. Because it is as a colourist that Macke is treasured today - even his most derivative paintings are lit with a luminous, Degas-like glow. Meseure defines Macke's life-work as an attempt to reconcile 'abstraction' with 'empathy', to paint the found world with severe formalism, pushing the representation towards abstraction without ever abandoning the former. Inevitably, dead at the age of 27, Macke cannot but seem (Meseure concludes) an artist of unfulfilled promise.

Macke's text is serviceable as a biographical introduction to the artist, and as a guide to the formal properties of his work, his use of colour and his compositional method. In overempahsising his interest in form over content, however, she tends to under-estimate the latter, which leads to some dubious interpretation of the paintings. For instance, the major 'Girls Under Trees' of 1914 is considered a 'utopian vision', despite the fact that one girl is isolated from two groups, separated from the one nearest by a phallic tree which might explain why. Meseure quotes Macke - 'Even in the games of children, even in the hat of a cocotte, in our joy at a sunny day, invisible ideas gently assume material form' - but doesn't seem to grasp the darker implications of this credo. the solitude, the inertia and the facelessness of his figures certainly allow for a more negative, perhaps deeper appreciation.

In any case, the magnificent, generous, full-colour reproductions allow us to make up our own minds. which begs one question - how can Taschen produce such high-quality reproductions in such cheaply priced books, when many of its competitors offer dull photocopies?