Lot 324 Dα

The title given to this sheet - an annotation added to the work in the artist's estate - is erroneous, as Ursula Heiderich has noted: “Römische Wasserleitung” deals not with a Roman aqueduct, but with a railway viaduct over the “Vallon de Rio” in L'Estaque, near Marseille. The artist photographed it while travelling through southern France on his way to “Tunis” and dealt with it in various works on paper from L'Estaque. His seeking out this village made so legendary by the French Cubists is noteworthy. Macke has also conceived the present large-format sketch in abstract terms by using delicate pencil hatching within the composition to alternate in strong contrasts between blank, light areas and concentrated, dark ones and to establish tectonic gradations in value. A pair of figures, two children already recorded in the previously mentioned photograph, have been inserted into the middle of the foreground (see Ursula Heiderich, August Macke, Die Skizzenbücher, vol. I, Stuttgart 1987, p. 144 with ill. 135 “Wasserholende Kinder, L'Estaque, 1914”). In the present drawing the figures of these children have become transformed and completely inscribed within the highly stylised and abstract, two-dimensional composition.