Joueuse de luth

In 1910 August Macke was 23, living near Bonn and just back from trips where he had seen the new French painting, above all Matisse. That encounter is all over this canvas. The young woman playing the lute is set down in flat blocks of bright colour, each shape closed with a dark outline, a way of building an image Macke borrowed from the painted-glass pictures made by Bavarian folk artists, which he collected. A white vase of orange flowers sits between us and her, and the whole surface stays calm and decorative rather than deep. He showed the picture the next winter in Munich, at the first exhibition of the circle around the painters Kandinsky and Franz Marc that became known as the Blue Rider. Macke was killed in the first months of the war, in 1914, at 27, so paintings like this one come from the short handful of years he actually had.