Springtime stroll
The watercolour Hat shop on the promenade was made in 1914, during the peak of the Blauer Reiter movement. Its melancholic tone, broken composition, and wide range of colours make it a textbook example of August Macke’s output from this period.
The dulled colour scale and facelessness of the figures in the painting convey a certain sense of depression. The contrasting of light and shade give the sensation of a shining, balmy late summer day. Macke has combined the subject of the promenade with that of the burgeoning fashion industry in big cities. The figures are bustling along the street, looking at the items on display in shop windows, and reading on a bench. This is an image of the mundane, of the everyday, bourgeois errands, of modern life, in which people have ceased to be individuals and have instead morphed into faceless figures. Yet the picture is also the expression of a new society and a new notion of art. The connection to reality is an indicator that Macke was firmly setting himself apart from his contemporaries in the Blauer Reiter school.
Macke and colours
Unlike Kandinsky, for example, Macke didn’t attribute any metaphysical value to colour, nor did he try to give it abstract meaning. Marc wrote the following for his obituary of Macke in 1914: “Of all of us, he gave colours the lightest and the purest sound, as clear and as bright as his entire being,” and described the clarity, order, and harmony in Macke’s works. Yet Macke attributed his motivation to focus on cubism and futurism, and to become acquainted with Munch’s works, to Robert Delaunay, whom he visited with Marc in Paris in 1912. He was particularly excited by the “window pictures”, in which the transparent, facet-like surfaces appear as pure colour. Before they even set off for Paris together, however, the artist was preoccupied with separating colour from object. It’s no wonder that Marc referred to his friend in one letter as “August Vonderfarbe”, or “August von Hue”. This is the most succinct description of August Macke’s artistic objective. The artist no longer thought of the object, but rather entirely of the colour. The watercolour Hat shop on the promenade is a testament to this unique perception.