Adieu

August Macke worked in bright, sunlit colour for most of his short career, close to the Blue Rider painters in Munich and to the pure colour of Robert Delaunay in Paris. Farewell, from 1914, is different, and it is almost the last thing he painted. The palette has gone dark and heavy, the figures pressed together on a dim street in the postures of parting. He made it as the First World War broke out that August. Within weeks Macke was in uniform, and on the 26th of September he was killed in fighting in Champagne, in eastern France. He was 27. This dark canvas of goodbyes came through the century and now hangs in the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.