Everyday Paradises
August Macke's "Unser Garten mit blühenden Rabatten" (Our Garden with Blooming Flower Beds) shows one of those typical scenes from the life of the artist: the visual delight he takes in the vibrant colors he uses to paint a sunny, slightly ascending path along the building, is impressively characterized by colors and shapes. The contrast between the austere façade and the casual yet immediate power of a cultivated and, at the same time, untamed nature conveys a sense of joy. Macke's visual representations of an ideal world, which the young painter envisioned in the modern guise of a contemporary paradise, are characteristic of his work. It is not uncommon for it to be a very personal Garden of Eden that blends into (ostensible) everyday scenes. People strolling about in sunny parks or zoological gardens, walking in a world of leisure, beauty, and relaxed contemplation, are motifs frequently used to articulate his vision of paradise. As illustrated in this garden painting, the exclusion of the troublesome yet equally mundane reveals this. It is a calm, secluded world in which Macke painted his family in the neat garden in Bonn, far from the humdrum beyond the wall on busy Bornheimer Straße. It is an idealized world showing his deep immersion in nature's rhythms. Hence, Unser Garten is a substitute for the Garden of Eden on Earth, where Macke transposes a modern, inner-city paradise or, in this case, a garden landscape with architecture. It is a variation of an idealized idea that he organizes in his mind and expresses in magnificent colors.




In many of his pictures, such as in the related painting “Gartenweg” (1912, Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster), Macke visualizes his dream of a perfect, paradisiacal world. The power of dreams is a critical element of his work and is also evident in this picture as an untouched corner of his very intimate living space. Many of Macke's paradisiacal images are imbued with a dream-like quality, and many of his works are motionless as Macke's figures appear in a state of contemplation. Nevertheless, they are also observers, often with their heads bowed, and their eyes closed, thus conveying the impression of a meditative state. In 1905, young Macke, who had a keen interest in theater, read “The World as Will and Representation” by Arthur Schopenhauer. “He has very interesting things to say about dreams,” Macke wrote to Elisabeth Gerhardt in Kandern on September 9, 1905 (August Macke, Briefe an Elisabeth und die Freunde, Munich 1987, p. 70).




Henri Matisse and the Fauves
His strong palette, with its bold colors, actually developed in contrast to the idea of paradise. By 1910 at the latest, when Macke saw pictures by, among others, Henri Matisse at Galerie Thannhauser in Munich, including “La terrasse, St. Tropez” (1904, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), of which he made a sketch (1910, sketchbook No. 38, p. 73), he embarked on an intense examination of the Fauves, their pictorial expression, their pursuit of immediacy, their use of color and treatment of light. The Fauves intensified the colors to the highest degree while balancing decorative and flat elements. Along with his clarity of presentation, Macke developed a strict reflection of painterly form, as seen here in the reproduction of the building, the residential and commercial building of his parents-in-law Carl Heinrich and Sophie Gerhardt on the right, with a view of the red-brick neighbor's house behind it.
Macke adored Henri Matisse, whose work he had already studied during his stay in Paris in the summer of 1907 and again during his honeymoon in the city on the Seine in early October 1909. These encounters would lead to a significant stylistic change in the paintings he created during his stay in Tegernsee the following year. The artist started to create highly simplified landscapes, remarkably still lifes, often with pure, intense colors. He defined forms with broad, curved contours and emphasized the surface.
Back in Bonn early in November, August Macke made a quick trip to Hagen before Christmas 1910 to see the second exhibition of the “Neue Künstlervereinigung München” at the Folkwang Museum. He was disappointed, as he expressed in a letter to Franz Marc, but also wrote enthusiastically: “I [..] saw two Matisses that delighted me.” (quoted from: August Macke Franz Marc Briefwechsel, Cologne 1964, p. 32). Alongside 'Stilleben mit Asphodelen' from 1906, Macke also saw 'La Berge' (Kunstmuseum Basel), a landscape from 1907. Macke was visibly engaged with their strict architecture in his landscape paintings.




Back in Bonn
In early November, August Macke and his wife Elisabeth, their almost seven-month-old son Walter, and their housemaid Anni returned to Bonn. They had finally decided against spending the winter at Tegernsee in Upper Bavaria. The young couple's considerations were dominated by their desire to exchange their nature-loving existence for a more urban context and to be closer to his wife's family, as well as the need for different working conditions. “But the question about the studio,” Macke wrote to his mother-in-law Sophie Gerhardt, “that is the most important thing” (Macke to Sophie Gerhardt, quoted from: August Macke, Briefe an Elisabeth und die Freunde, Munich 1987, p. 258). Renovation of the studio in the small house on his parents-in-law's property increasingly occupied the artist; in February 1911, it had finally been completed. The studio with a loft on the fourth floor was a blessing for Macke: it had large windows on three sides and a large skylight that allowed him a vast view of the surrounding area, with the very busy Ringstrasse, the Kölner Chaussee with the tower of the mental asylum, Viktoria Bridge, which crosses the railroad tracks right in front of the house across the road, and of Marienkirche, which, surrounded by suburban houses, presents itself in a different light every day.

However, Macke not only painted like strange forces drove him, but he was also caught up in art and cultural-political activities as an exhibiting artist. During the relatively short period of his stay in Bonn from 1910 to 1914, he was involved in events of epochal significance. In addition to being a member of the editorial board of the “Blauer Reiter” magazine, which Macke mainly promoted in the Rhineland, contributing, among other things, an article titled “Die Masken” (The Masks), he was also on the committee of the “International Art Exhibition of the 'Sonderbund' of West German Art Lovers and Artists” in Cologne in the summer of 1912, as well as the campaign for the “Exhibition of Rhenish Expressionists” at Cohen's in Bonn in 1913, and the “First German Autumn Salon” at Herwarth Walden's Berlin gallery “Der Sturm” in the same year. At the beginning of 1911, the Gereonsklub was founded in Cologne. It offered a painting and drawing school, exhibitions (such as a “Blauer Reiter” exhibition in January 1912), a debating club, and various other events, many of which under the aegis of August Macke.




Paris again
From September 22 to 26, 1912, Franz Marc and his wife Maria visited August Macke in Bonn. Mark and Macke painted the large mural “Paradise” in his studio and visited the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne. Inspired by the works of young French artists, Franz and Maria Marc went to Paris with August Macke for a week. “Today we were at the Delaunay's. Very nice! They have a boy. Afterward, at Vollard (apartment), Durand-Ruel, etc. Yesterday morning at the Herbstsalon (awful),” Macke wrote to his wife Elisabeth in Bonn on October 2 (August Macke, Briefe an Elisabeth und die Freunde, Munich 1987, p. 291). On October 21, after their return from Paris, August Macke presumably reported to his wife's uncle, the patron and collector Bernhard Koehler in Berlin: “What struck us in Paris was the lack of talent among the Cubists on display. I was very impressed by what we saw of Picasso and Delaunay. I must also say that the Futurists, who are now in Cologne, impressed me very much. These ideas are even more important for modern painting than Picasso.” (August Macke, Briefe an Elisabeth und die Freunde, p. 292).
Like hardly any other artist, Macke was informed about the latest trends in painting, and he was also familiar with the important art dealers in Paris at the time: Ambroise Vollard represented, among others, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse; Paul Durand-Ruel was the gallerist of Paul Cézanne and the Impressionists. Moreover, this extensive knowledge is also reflected in the colorful paintings. [MvL]