Índios a Cavalo

Macke painted these riders in the summer of 1911, and he never saw anything like them in life. He worked in Bonn, in western Germany, and imagined the horsemen entirely, one art historian noting that he built them from an inner vision of distant peoples rather than from anything he had observed. That autumn Macke and his friend Franz Marc helped launch the Blue Rider, the Munich circle that put spiritual feeling and pure color ahead of copying the visible world, and this painting hung in their very first exhibition in December 1911. The colors run hot and unnatural, the horses almost merging into the land. Macke was 24 here. He would be killed in the opening weeks of the First World War, three years later.