August Macke
August Macke spent the summer months of 1914, like previous ones, with his family in Hilterfingen on Lake Thun in Switzerland. The shops in the streets of the Old Town (Thun) and the surrounding landscape constantly reappear as motifs in the artist’s works. This includes the hat store which, like other clothing stores, fascinated the artist pictorially and inspired him to a series of shop window paintings, to which he attached considerable import. Robert Delaunay’s window paintings, with their complex play of painted reflections of light and mirroring, doubtless served as an inspiration for August Macke. He chose a calmer, seemingly static composition, however. Only the colorful hats on display counteract the woman with the parasol’s statue-like pose. The hat shop façade, like the showcase walls, are strictly structured geometric planes.
August Robert Ludwig Macke died on 26 September 1914, so this painting was one of his last ones. He was a German Expressionist painter and one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). He lived during a particularly innovative time for German art; he saw the development of the main German Expressionist movements as well as the arrival of the successive avant-garde movements that were forming in the rest of Europe. Like a true artist of his time, Macke knew how to integrate into his painting the elements of the avant-garde, which most interested him.
P.S. Here you will find everything you need to know about Expressionism.