The Storm

Macke painted this in 1911, the year he and a handful of others in Munich were forming the group they called the Blue Rider. He was young, and the sunlit, glowing colour he became loved for was still ahead of him. This picture is darker and more turbulent: two figures caught out in a storm, leaning into a wind you can almost feel in the way the whole surface seems to bend and stream around them. He had not yet met the French painter Robert Delaunay, whose radiant colour would soon change everything for him. That change, and most of Macke's short working life, was cut off in 1914, when he was killed in the first weeks of the war at 27.