Turkish Café

In April 1914 August Macke sailed to Tunisia with two painter friends, Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet. Two weeks of North African light changed how he used color, and back home in Bonn he worked the trip up into paintings like this one. The scene is the covered entrance to the Café des Nattes in Sidi Bou Said, near Tunis, remembered as flat fields of pure color: a seated figure in green set against a blue wall, a red fez against it, a door of orange and violet. That same summer the war broke out. Macke was called up, sent to the front in France, and killed at the end of September, 27 years old. This is one of two versions he made from memory of that café; he gave it to Bernhard Koehler, the Berlin collector whose money had paid for the trip.