Portrait of Bernhard Koehler

Bernhard Koehler was a wealthy Berlin manufacturer and the uncle of Macke's wife Elisabeth. In 1908 he went to Paris with Macke and Elisabeth, toured the galleries with the young painter as his adviser, and came home with a run of modern French pictures. Over the following years his collection grew to take in Cézanne, Monet, Degas and Delaunay alongside the Blue Rider painters, and he put money into their almanac of 1912 and into the First German Autumn Salon, the big Berlin exhibition of 1913. Macke painted him more than once. In this portrait from 1910 he kept almost entirely to grey, black and white and left the background barely worked, which the Lenbachhaus traces to Manet, a painter Macke admired. The calm blue eyes are framed by the simple outline of hair and beard, with a warm reddish touch on the high forehead. The picture comes from Koehler's own collection. A large part of the rest of it burned in Berlin in 1945.