The exhibition "Breakthrough into Modernity - August Mäke and the Rhenish Expressionists" at the Bonn Art Museum tells the story of the beginning of the 20th century in a striking way. And it still defines us with its social and aesthetic consequences. The era that lasted almost the entire last century until it was replaced by the diffuse postmodern era, gave birth to a series of avant-garde art movements at its very beginnings - from impressionism at the end of the 19th century to surrealism and other "isms". Expressionism has a special place in all of this, at least for me. In this, August Mäke occupies a unique position in the entire expressionist palette. I have long wanted to visit the exhibition in Bonn.
Luckily, the exhibition is intended to be a long-term one. I missed it last year, but this year I found myself in the Art Museum, which is itself a work of late modern art.
Expressionism did not want to create decorative paintings, but turned to the “aggressive deformation” of forms. Like Cubism, it found inspiration in the archaic and primitive. The banal was declared heroic, and the bourgeois “sublime” ridiculous. In poetry, the aesthetics of the ugly replaced the pursuit of harmony. True, here the poets stood on the shoulders of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and the painters could refer to Lautrec, Van Gogh and Munch. The poems of Stefan Heim or Gottfried Benn are the best examples of how the artistic power of the expressionists transforms the ugly matter of life into essentially beautiful verses. The world of industrialization and mass death in war could no longer be expressed in the old language anyway.
At the exhibition, a copy of my favorite book from that time, "The Twilight of Mankind," was placed on a small table. I remember buying my copy in an antique shop in Regensburg in the early 1919s. It is a significant anthology of German expressionist lyrics. The poems showed the same thing as the colors - a new world in all its contradictions. The book was written in XNUMX. August Macke had been dead for five years.
But his canvases lived. The “Wire Dancer” before me sums up the coming era in one of the most significant artistic expressions. Isn't this figure, which amazes us and with which we are afraid, actually our world which in an increasingly crazy circus threatens to be irreversibly shifted out of balance and to fall into the abyss. All this to the fanfare of an entertainment orchestra.
The exhibition is not only intended as a presentation of the art of that time, but also as a reconstruction of the time itself. On the walls, in addition to the works of painters from the Rhineland, among whom the most famous is August Macke, are highlighted notes about what was being built at the time, what the political context was, where science was with its discoveries. In short, the world was experiencing an unprecedented acceleration in all areas, and art offered a new expression of this dynamic.
A century ago, August Macke organized an exhibition in Bonn where he brought together the works of the expressionists who were active on the banks of the Rhine. In doing so, he wanted to draw attention to the Rhineland, where, in addition to the existing world centers of avant-garde art, such as Vienna, Paris, Berlin and increasingly New York, an artistic movement on a par with the times was also forming in Bonn, Cologne, and Düsseldorf.
August Make is avant-garde in his style of painting, but his world is still not that of the lost metropolitan individual. Rather, he paints a lost paradise on whose horizon the industrial era is emerging.
“Children at a Fountain with a City in the Background” is a painting that still contains the modesty of an era that is fading, although the manner of painting is already at odds with it. I remember the world in which Make lived. Colonial powers ruthlessly conquer distant lands and subjugate peoples. At the exhibition I read that the World Exhibition in Ghent in 1913, in which 24 countries participated, had 10 million visitors. It deals with flowers and colonies. The gladioluses that Make paints come from southern Europe, the Middle East or Africa. The “exotic” foreign colony left its mark on the works of the expressionists. Make is no exception. In 1914, he went on a trip to Tunisia with Paul Klee. His drawings and watercolors bear witness to that trip.
Make never paints completely abstractly. Street scenes, parks, landscapes, architecture and people inhabit his pictorial cosmos. But also still lifes as a favorite painting motif since the Baroque seventeenth century. Make's "Still Life with a Bowl of Apples and a Japanese Fan" shows that the expressionist desire for distances can also inhabit a canvas without people. The Japanese fan becomes part of the still life.
The path to this canvas was somewhat nomadic. August Mäke was born in January 1887 in the Westphalian town of Meschede. His father, August Friedrich, had found work there as an engineer building a railway. His mother, Maria, a local woman, was the daughter of a baker. August was the sixth child - three sisters had died before his birth.
The family moved to Cologne immediately after the boy's birth. August attended high school there, but the family moved again - this time to Bonn. At the Bonn high school, August Make showed a talent for drawing and painting and a great interest in art.
A BOY AT THE BOUNDARY OF EPOCLES
The gifted boy was sixteen when he met his future wife, Elisabeth Gerhart, the daughter of a Bonn manufacturer. From that moment on, she was his most important model. He made over 200 portraits of her. At the Bonn exhibition, it was the first painting I stopped in front of for a long time. Elisabeth with Valterčić.
Proof of the love of a husband and father - in his art he did not run away from his private life but turned it into art.
Mäke was lucky because his wife's uncle, the Berlin entrepreneur and collector Bernard Keller, supported the young artist. Against his father's wishes, Mäke left high school in his penultimate year in 1904 to enroll at the Royal Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf. There, he criticized the rigid curriculum, especially drawing from plaster casts. He left the academy in 1906. The previous year, he had enrolled in a course at the Düsseldorf Crafts School. He met the circle of artists around the Düsseldorf Theater and enthusiastically accepted an offer to design sets and costumes for a series of plays. The writer Wilhelm Schmidtbon described the nineteen-year-old Mäke as follows: "He was broad-shouldered and tall, with a healthy, smiling face. His figure, face, and voice filled our room in an unusual way... He showered us with strength and joy of life, which we thought we had enough of ourselves."
If I had not read this description of the artist, I would not have been able to imagine such a man behind the famous self-portrait I stand before in Bonn, more than a century after its creation. Make seems somewhat cold, unapproachable, perhaps even wistful.
In 1907, he spent his first time in Paris. In the then global capital of avant-garde painting trends, Impressionism and Fauvism made a great impression on the twenty-year-old German painter. Applying pure colors to canvas was what he took home as a fascination. He decided to study further with Lovis Korint in Berlin, one of the most important German Impressionists. He used those six months to visit Berlin's museums.
The very next year he traveled to Italy, and in 1908 he went to Paris with Elisabeth and her uncle Bernard Keller. Macke acted as an advisor to a wealthy collector who intended to add Impressionist paintings to his collection.
CITY ON THE HORIZON
In the second room are paintings that already clearly thematize the new dynamics of the world. In the cities, factory chimneys have outgrown church steeples. The painting “St. Mary's Church in Bonn with Houses and Chimney” best embodies this.
Make volunteered for a year of military service in Bonn, then he and Elizabeth got married because the young woman was pregnant. The inheritance that Make's wife received from her father enabled a carefree life. In 1910, their son Walter was born, and in 1913, their son Wolfgang.
What is glimpsed in Make's paintings is already a reality for millions of people. The cities are nervous, full of depression and smoke. Workers' districts are growing rapidly, along with barracks and red-light districts. The largest and most striking buildings - the cathedrals of the modern era - are becoming railway stations.
Wealthy people fled from the nervous metropolis to the countryside, to the shores of lakes, to the mountains. Vacation was therapy. People traveled by train, and the railways reached increasingly remote areas. It is likely that the Makes couple traveled south to Munich by train in 1911. About fifty kilometers south of Munich, almost on the Austrian border, is Tegernse, a lake with a town of the same name. The Makes went there at the invitation of their Düsseldorf friend, the writer Schmidtbon and his wife. Their son Walter was born in the town on the lake. The Makes stayed in Bavaria for almost a year. Perhaps their most significant paintings were created during this period.
I returned to one of them twice. It simply enchanted me. "Vegetable Fields" radically realized the expressionist postulate - the banal became sublime.
Three years before that, Make had gone through an impressionist phase. But under the influence of Henri Matisse, he himself began to apply pure color to the canvases. The expression is immediately visible, the energy of unfettered colors passes on to the observer. He participated in the exhibition of the Blue Rider group in 1911. Then he took on cubist and even futuristic elements. But he remained his own.
Although he is already one of the most prominent German painters of the new wave, he does not share the basic pessimistic tone of his generation. His outlook is brighter, devoid of tragedy, madness, or metropolitan neurosis. Make walked through this world with a joy of life, painting in the language of his generation - but something different.
In August 1914, a young man, barely seven years younger than Macke, shoots Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. History thickens and, like a whirlpool, draws the painter into its vortex. He is mobilized as a reserve non-commissioned officer and goes to the Western Front. Heavy losses in the officer corps lead to his being promoted to officer in August. He writes home from the front in his optimistic style at first. But soon his words are darkened by the horrors of war. He dies at the Marne in September of the same year at the age of twenty-seven. Two weeks before that, he was awarded the Iron Cross. He is buried in a mass grave near the French town of Suess.
His posthumous fame grew with the postwar triumph of expressionism. As an eighteen-year-old he read Schopenhauer and, like the entire expressionist generation, Nietzsche. For Macke, life was a long dream. We always see something of dreaming on his canvases.
The Nazis included his works in their infamous "Perverted Art" exhibition in 1937. But they withdrew them from the exhibition when the German Officers' Association and Macke's surviving comrades, veterans of the Marne, rebelled.
Thus, the works I bid farewell to have survived to give me an entire afternoon of enjoying the joy of life of a man who has been dead for a hundred years.
Bonus video:
