August Macke and Franz Marc

de Volker Adolphs, Annegret Hoberg

"[August Macke and Franz Marc] conducted many long and involved discussions about the goals of art, coming to both similar and different conclusions. These dialogues enabled each of them to stake out his own position and provided the impetus driving their exchange. While Macke's art referred directly to the world he saw around him, his images deriving their authenticity from the sensual presence of that world, Marc sought to arrive at a spiritual understanding of the world and strove to develop art forms that would render visible the unity of being in his pictures. Divided into several sections, the exhibition traces the development of both artists from 1910 onward : from their first encounters in Tegernsee, Sindelsdorf, and later Bonn, to their early preoccupation with the theory of color, their work within the Blue Rider, and their participation in important exhibitions, such as those staged by the Cologne Sonderbund and the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon. In its portrayal of the journeys they undertook together, their reciprocal visits and gifts, and the execution of arts and crafts works, the exhibition also attests to the key role played in their deepening friendship by the two artists' wives, Elisabeth Macke and Maria Marc. Their bond culminated in 1912 in the mural Paradise, jointly painted in Macke's Bonne studio. The exhibition also shows in some detail how Macke and Marc incorporated the ideas of Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism in their work as well as the positions they adopted on the notion of non-representative art. Out of these influences and ideas each evolved an art of his own, a trajectory that the exhibition documents right up to the final pictures produced in 1914, when the catastrophe of war brought an abrupt end to their lives and work."--Foreword.