The last summer of color: August macke and the fleeting light before the war

Yet in this work, as in so many others, there is no trace of the dread gripping Europe. No threatening shadows, no sky heavy with foreboding. Only this vibrant light, these dancing colors, these moments stolen from eternity. As if Macke had sensed the world was about to tip into chaos, and had chosen, in a final act of defiance, to capture pure, untouched beauty before history shattered it.

01Color as an act of faith

August Macke never believed in manifestos. Unlike Kandinsky, who theorized art as a "spiritual necessity," or Franz Marc, obsessed with purifying the world through painting, Macke painted as naturally as he breathed: with a joy so guileless, a faith so absolute in the power of color. For him, red was not rebellion, blue not melancholy. They simply were—living forces, pure emotion.

Take The Lady in the Green Coat (1913). A woman sits, her face half-hidden in the shadow of her hat, hands folded in her lap. Nothing dramatic, nothing spectacular. Yet look closer: the emerald green of her coat clashes with the reddish-orange background, creating a tension almost electric. The folds of her dress are suggested by nearly abstract brushstrokes, as if form itself were dissolving into color. Macke isn’t trying to represent reality—he recreates it, magnifies it, transforms it into something truer than true.

He owes this approach in part to Matisse, whom he discovered during a trip to Paris in 1907. In the master’s studio, he saw The Dance and Music—canvases where bodies were little more than pretexts for explosions of color. But where Matisse used distortion to shock, Macke remained faithful to a certain gentleness. His colors don’t scream. They sing, softly, like a melody you’d recognize anywhere.

02The journey that changed everything

In April 1914, Macke set off for Tunisia with two friends: Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet. This trip, lasting only two weeks, would revolutionize his palette. Under the North African sun, the colors he knew—those reds, blues, greens he wielded with such virtuosity—suddenly seemed too pale, too timid. The light in Tunis was different: harsher, more intense, almost liquid. It dissolved contours, made shadows vibrate, turned every wall, every tree, every face into a shimmering mosaic.

In Tunisian Gardens (1914), one of his final masterpieces, this revelation is clear. The white walls of the houses, streaked with blue and ochre, seem to pulse with heat. The trees, reduced to emerald green patches, cast violet shadows on the ground. The human figures, barely sketched, melt into this whirlwind of color like notes in a score. Macke wrote in his notebook: "Color possesses me. I no longer need to chase it. It possesses me forever, I know it now. This is the meaning of this happy hour: color and I are one. I am a painter."

What he didn’t yet know was that this hour would be his last. A few months later, war broke out. Macke was mobilized. He died in battle on September 26, 1914, at the age of 27. His Tunisian notebooks, filled with sketches and watercolors, would be partly lost, scattered, forgotten. Only a few canvases, miraculously preserved, would bear witness to this brief but dazzling encounter with light.

03These women walking toward the unknown

If Macke is now recognized as one of the great colorists of the 20th century, it is also because he captured the spirit of an era through his female figures better than anyone. In his paintings, women don’t pose. They walk, they dream, they look away, as if they, too, sensed the world was about to change.

Look at Promenade (1913): the woman in red, at the center, strides forward with determination, but her face remains in shadow. Behind her, the man and child seem almost unreal, like ghosts of a past that no longer exists. The trees, stylized into geometric shapes, frame the scene like a stage set. Everything is in motion, everything is fleeting. Yet there is a strange serenity in this painting, as if Macke had wanted to freeze, one last time, the image of ordinary happiness before it vanished.

These women appear everywhere in his work: in a blue dress in Woman with a Hat (1913), in a green coat in the painting of the same name, or more discreetly in Elisabeth at the Garden Table (1910), where his wife, seated before a cup of tea, seems lost in thought. They all share the same distant gaze, the same slightly old-fashioned elegance, as if they already belonged to another time.

And perhaps that is Macke’s genius: to have captured, in these seemingly ordinary figures, the fragility of a world on the brink of collapse.

04The art of painting the invisible

What strikes you in Macke’s canvases is their apparent simplicity. No complex compositions, no obscure symbols, no political messages. Just scenes from everyday life, rendered with an economy of means that borders on the miraculous. Yet behind this simplicity lies prodigious technical mastery.

Take View in an Alley (1914). At first glance, it’s an ordinary scene: a woman walks down a tree-lined street, a child plays at her feet. But look closer. The trees aren’t painted realistically—their trunks are reduced to vertical strokes, their leaves to patches of color. The ground is a mosaic of greens, blues, and yellows, as if light itself had been captured and spread across the canvas. And then there are those details that aren’t really details: the half-open door of a house, the dog running past, the window reflecting an invisible sky. Everything seems both precise and blurred, like a fading memory.

Macke wasn’t trying to reproduce reality. He was trying to grasp its essence, to extract its poetry. To do this, he used techniques that were revolutionary at the time. He layered paint, playing with transparency and opacity to create depth. He used pure, unmixed colors to intensify their luminosity. And above all, he simplified forms, reducing them to their purest expression, as if he wanted to get to the heart of things.

He shared this approach with his friends from Der Blaue Reiter—Kandinsky, Marc, Jawlensky. But where they pushed abstraction to its limits, Macke remained rooted in the figurative. For him, color wasn’t a way to escape reality but to magnify it, to make it more alive, more intense.

05The mystery of the lost canvases

Macke’s death in 1914 left behind an unfinished body of work—and many unanswered questions. What would he have become had he survived the war? Would he have followed Klee into more radical abstraction? Or would he have continued exploring this middle path, between figuration and pure color, that defines his charm?

We know he was working, in the last months of his life, on a series of paintings inspired by his Tunisian journey. Some were lost, others never completed. In the 1930s, the Nazis confiscated several of his works, labeling them "degenerate art." Some were destroyed, others sold abroad, disappearing into private collections.

Even today, Macke’s paintings resurface, like Market in Tunis, discovered in a Swiss collection in 2020. Each new find adds a piece to the puzzle, helping us better understand this artist who left us too soon. But shadows remain. Why, for example, did he abandon the idea of a large composition on music, of which only a few sketches survive? And what do those nearly abstract geometric motifs mean, appearing in his final canvases?

Perhaps these mysteries are part of his allure. Macke was a painter of the moment, of the ephemeral. His canvases capture instants that, without him, would have vanished forever. As if, by fixing these fragments of light and color, he wanted to remind us that beauty, however fragile, is worth saving.

06The legacy of a painter without a school

Today, August Macke is finally recognized for his true worth. His paintings, exhibited in the world’s greatest museums, continue to fascinate with their freshness, their luminosity, their joy. Yet for decades, he remained in the shadow of his contemporaries—too gentle for the radical expressionists, too figurative for the abstractionists, too discreet for art historians in search of tragic heroes.

Yet his influence is everywhere. In Rothko’s canvases, where colors seem to float like clouds of light. In David Hockney’s compositions, where California pools and gardens uncannily echo Macke’s sunlit alleys. Even in contemporary design, you find this obsession with pure colors, bold contrasts, simplified forms.

But his greatest legacy, perhaps, lies elsewhere. In an era like ours, where everything moves too fast, where crises follow one another, where the future seems uncertain, Macke’s paintings remind us of a simple truth: beauty exists, even in the darkest moments. You just have to know how to see it.

So the next time you see a woman in a red dress walking down a path, or sunlight filtering through the leaves of a tree, remember him. Remember this young painter who, over a century ago, chose to capture joy rather than despair. And who, in doing so, left us one of the most beautiful testaments to what art can still accomplish: making the world a little brighter.