People by the Blue Lake

The Rhinelander August Macke was an important mediator of French painting to German modernism. He belonged to the circle around the Blauer Reiter, but developed his own visual language. This is easy to comprehend when standing in front of the painting People by the Blue Lake.

A man, a woman, and a little girl are strolling along a lake. Regarding the motifs, the painting stands in the tradition of genre paintings, especially the Sunday pictures by Georges Seurat. Despite the freedom of the color scheme, the colorful autumn foliage is clearly recognizable. The idyll of the walk seems like a Sunday, almost like paradise. As is characteristic of Macke, he focuses on leisure and joie de vivre. Although Macke’s large, equally sized color fields take away the picture’s impression of depth, one can still experience the strollers’ movement in space. The artist took a cubist approach, modelling in simple forms. Cool and warm colors of different spatial and sculptural effects stand side by side, making the picture dynamic, however much it retains its two-dimensional unity. Even if the motif is rather universal, the painting reflects the situation of the artist during his recreational holiday at Lake Thun, where he stayed from the end of September 1913 until spring 1914. During this time, which was particularly happy for Macke and his wife, he created People by the Blue Lake. One year later, Macke, who was only 27 years old, was killed on the battlefield in Champagne.

We present today's work thanks to the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. <3

P.S. German Expressionism was a revolutionary art movement using modern forms of expression, later banned by the Nazi Party as "degenerate." A 16th-century artist, however, was called the grandfather of Expressionism. Can you guess which one? Here you can read about it.

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