Couple in the Forest

In 1912, in Berlin, Ludwig Meidner began painting cities that buckle and burn, the series he called apocalyptic landscapes. The same currents reached Macke in Bonn. From Cubist and Futurist painting he had taken the habit of breaking a scene into faceted, overlapping planes, and this square canvas, a metre each way, is put together that way. What he set inside it is two people among trees. He was 25 that year, with a wife and a small son, and the subjects he kept choosing were of exactly this order, walks and gardens and the lit windows of shops.