Lot 47 Dα

After his intensive efforts on behalf of the “Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon”, which Herwarth Walden opened in Berlin on 20 September 1913, August Macke and his family moved on to Switzerland at the end of the month for an extended stay by Lake Thun. Biographically and artistically, this period around 1913/1914 was among the happiest and most fruitful of his short life. His being a close neighbour of the married couple Louis and Helene Moilliet and his ties to Paul Klee, who visited the Macke family together with Lily Klee in Hilterfingen in early January 1914, would cause the artist's plans for a journey to Tunisia in the spring of 1914 to become concrete. August Macke found himself at the pinnacle of his personal development as a painter - the pictures he created in Hilterfingen are among his “most important” and “highest quality” works (Ernst-Gerhard Güse). His drawing also took on substantial significance and established itself as an art form as important as his paintings.
The charming pen-and-ink drawing “Spaziergänger auf der Brücke” features the motif of an elegant couple out for a stroll beneath the trees and displays a thematic as well as stylistic affinity to two larger 1914 chalk drawings from museums, although, as Ursula Heiderich acknowledges, it could have preceded them (cf. the compositions “Spaziergänger im Park”, 31.5 x 40 cm, Franz Marc Museum, Kochel a. See, Heiderich 2420 (see our comparative illus.), and “Spaziergänger unter Bäumen”, 34.5 x 29.8 cm, formerly at the Städtisches Kunstmuseum Bonn, Heiderich 2419 - see also Lempertz, Auction 1059, 27 Nov. 2015, Lot 306). The latter of these sheets done in chalk places the flâneurs within a more broadly conceived panorama reminiscent of Fribourg, for which August Macke is documented as having set out with Bernhard Koehler in March of that year. In these works the artist has compositionally woven separate elements and motifs into pictorial organisms that are each individual and modified. Interestingly Macke's motif of people strolling beneath trees had already been shaped in advance early on in his career, in his depiction of the "Hofgarten" in Bonn (1904), but particularly his experience of Paris in 1907 left a comparable figurative mark in his sketchbooks (Ursula Heiderich, Zur Zeichenkunst August Mackes, in: exhib. cat., August Macke: Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Münster/ Bonn/ München 1986/1987, see pp. 119, 121).
As a pen-and-ink drawing, “Spaziergänger auf der Brücke” presents a focused composition that features a vignette-like view, but is nevertheless formally concentrated and produces a very unified effect through a slight axial symmetry. On the whole, the motif develops a semi-geometrical structure and three-dimensional perspective through the graphic elements' almost synchronous movement out of and into the picture plane. This reveals the artist's engagement with Cubism, just as the sheet's verso - featuring sweeping lines and segmented colouring - shows August Macke's occupation with purely abstract and ornamental images.