The Fashion Store

Macke painted this in 1913, a woman paused alone before a shop window with her back to us, taking in the display. He was drawn again and again to these ordinary city pleasures - people strolling, hat shops, sunlit arcades - and set them down in soft blocks of color he had taken from the French painter Robert Delaunay, whom he had visited in Paris the year before. He was 26, already one of the younger voices of the Blaue Reiter group in Munich. A year later he was dead. Called up in August 1914, he was killed in Champagne that September, among the first painters lost in the war. He made a whole run of these shop-window scenes in his last two years, and this is one of them.