Naked Girl with Headscarf

The Berlin dealer Paul Cassirer showed Matisse in 1910, and German painters went to see what he was doing. Macke was 23 that year, and in the nudes he made around then he cut face and body down to a few flat, simplified shapes.

The Städel, which owns this one, points to the way it is arranged. The headscarf, the head bent forward, the arms drawn across the chest all belong to the manner in which Madonnas were painted, and they keep the picture quiet, well away from the frankly erotic nudes the Brücke painters were producing in the same years. Macke worked this way for roughly two years.

Afterwards it stayed in private hands in Frankfurt for most of a century. One of its owners was Hanna Bekker vom Rath, who from the late 1930s kept and quietly showed work the regime had condemned. The Städel received the painting as a gift in 1987.