Sunny Path

In 1912 Macke went to Paris and met Robert Delaunay, a French painter working out how pure colour on its own could carry a picture. He came home to Germany won over. This sunlit path, from the next year, is colour used as light. People stroll under the trees while the sun drops in bright patches across the ground, but look at the faces and they are left blank, unpainted, so the walkers melt into the coloured air around them. What the picture is about is not who they are but the warmth of an ordinary afternoon walk. Macke was among the youngest painters of the German avant-garde. He finished this in 1913. The next summer the war began, and he was killed in France that autumn, at 27.