Turkish Café

In April 1914 Macke landed at Tunis with two other painters, Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet. They had about two weeks. They went up to Sidi Bou Said on the cliff above the bay, out to Hammamet, and inland to Kairouan, and it was at Kairouan that Klee wrote in his diary that colour had taken hold of him, that he no longer had to chase after it, that he was a painter.

Macke worked in watercolour and pencil while he was there and made the oils after he got home to Bonn. He painted this motif twice. Moilliet said later that it was the covered entrance at the foot of the steps up to the Cafe des Nattes at Sidi Bou Said, with its striped awning and a man in a fez sitting with his back to the street.

The title says Turkish. Tunisia in 1914 was a French protectorate whose ruler had been a vassal of the Ottoman sultan, and European painters of the day used the word loosely for the whole of that world. The panel is small, about 25 by 35 centimetres, oil on wood, signed and dated along the bottom. Kunstmuseum Bonn bought it in 1949 together with Macke's Tightrope Walker, and those two pictures are where that museum's collection begins.