Our Street in Grey

This is Bornheimer Straße in Bonn, seen from the window of the new studio Macke moved into in 1911. A few trees across the road are already in blossom, and otherwise there is no sign of spring. He turned the grey day into an exercise. He mixed a light grey, shifted it slightly with small additions of other colours, and kept every tone at almost the same strength. Then he set yellow, orange, red and blue against it, the same colours he had mixed in, now in purer form. Since the year before he had been friends with Franz Marc, and the two traded their colour theories and exercises by letter. At Marc's house he had also come across handbooks on making colour woodcuts in the Japanese manner. The picture borrows from them, with no light and shade, flat areas of colour placed straight against each other, and tiny figures. On the back, an unknown hand wrote the title and the year 1913.