Flowers in the Garden, Clivia and Pelargoniums

1911 pulled Macke in several directions at once. His new friends in Munich, Kandinsky and Franz Marc, were heading towards abstraction, and his own pictures from that year, the Lenbachhaus says, do not settle into a single style. This one looks back. It follows on from the still lifes he had painted at the Tegernsee in 1909 and 1910, and the museum sees it as the last high point of his Fauve phase and his long engagement with Matisse. The subject is a corner of his own garden in Bonn, clivias and pelargoniums in pots. Saturated greens fill nearly the whole canvas, set against three bright red blossoms, the clay red of the pots and a violet ground pushed in under the leaves. More and more, Macke wrote, he wanted to find the space-making energies of colour. Soon afterwards he went looking for them in Cubism and Futurism.