Color Forms I

Macke spent almost all of his short career on visible things, shop windows, hats, people walking under trees. In March 1913 he filled sheet after sheet with drawings that refer to nothing at all. What set him off was Robert Delaunay's window pictures, which he had seen in Paris and again in Cologne, in which daylight is broken down into separate patches of colour.

This small panel came out of that run. It is oil on cardboard laid on plywood, about half a metre high, built from flat geometric fields of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. It is the first of a numbered group, and the museum in Münster counts only around five fully abstract paintings in everything Macke made. The picture hung there on loan from a private owner from 1981 before the museum was finally able to buy it.