The Artist’s Wife

This is a reading picture before it is a portrait. Elisabeth sits with a book open in her hands, turned down and away from the room, and everything around her is household furniture: an oil lamp on a side table, a bowl of fruit, an embroidered cloth running across the whole lower half of the painting.

Macke painted it in 1912 on cardboard rather than canvas, laying down flat fields of blue, green and red and drawing a dark line around each of them. That hard outline is the thing to watch. It holds her silhouette closed while the space behind her flattens out, and it comes from his looking hard at Matisse in those years.

The picture went to Berlin much later. West Berlin bought it in 1955 from a Cologne dealer, using state lottery money, for a new municipal collection of 20th-century art that was being assembled almost from nothing.