August Macke

Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke (the artist's wife, by descent)
Sale: Galerie Gerda Bassenge, Berlin, 3rd-7th May 1966, lot 1298
Gordon Hampton, California (by 1974)
Sale: Christie's, London, 30th June 1980, lot 35
Sale: Sotheby's, London, 1st  April 1981, lot 45
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Pasadena, Pasadena Art Museum, German Expressionist Painting & Sculpture from Californian Collections, 1974

Gustav Vriesen, August Macke, Stuttgart, 1957, no. 313, listed p. 325
Ursula Heiderich, August Macke - Gemälde, Ostfildern, 2008, no. 398, illustrated p. 427 

The canvas is unlined. There is an area of retouching in the lower left corner, several spots of retouching to the boy's head, and other scattered spots of retouching, visible under ultra-violet light. Apart from some horizontal lines of craquelure, this work is in good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration.
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Painted in 1912, Junge mit Buch und Spielsachen is a vividly coloured interior scene that belongs to a highly innovative period of Macke's œuvre during which he created some of his most powerful works. Macke was, together with Jawlensky and Kandinsky, one of the first members of the Blaue Reiter group to recognise the importance of post-Impressionist and Fauve art, and to adapt the colour-theories of the French avant-garde artists to his own style. He first visited Paris in 1907, and again in 1909 he saw the works of the Fauve artists such as Matisse, whose bold use of vibrant colours (fig. 1) had a strong impact on the artist. The present work brilliantly conveys Macke's belief in the total freedom of artistic expression, not only due to its strong colours, but also in light of its unassuming subject matter, a little boy reading.

In 1912, Macke's painting moved away from the nearly abstract, geometrically inspired compositions and adopted a new softness and free-flowing style visible in the present work. Colour became the single most important element of his painting. The artist himself proclaimed: 'The most important thing for me is the direct observation of the movement of colours. Only in this I have found the laws of those simultaneous and complementary colour contrasts that nourish the actual rhythm of my vision. In this I find the actual essence, an essence which is not born out of an a priori system or theory' (quoted in Gustav Vriesen, op. cit., p. 120, translated from German). Junge mit Buch und Spielsachen is a wonderful example of this new direction whereby spatial values are defined by colour.

Commenting on Macke's individuality of style, the artist's close friend Lothar Erdmann remarked: 'The question of the meaning of life, the longing of the formula for the infinite joy of life, this everlasting question of problematic natures was alien to Macke... from the unconscious depths of his nature streamed an invincible faith in the inner truth of that which his senses grasped and his spirit offered' (L. Erdmann quoted in Ernst-Gerhard Güse (ed.), August Macke, Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Munich, 1986, pp. 36-37, translated from German).