Lot 48 Dα

Macke's sheet “Orientalisches Liebespaar” uses a few boldly colourful lines to sketch a motif suggestive of a fairy tale. In the composition's Romantic ardour of feeling, we feel ourselves vaguely reminded of Moritz von Schwind or Francesca da Rimini and pictures emerging from the tales of the “Thousand and One Nights”. The lovers sit, sheltered in the midst of the shadowy vegetation and surrounded by projecting blooms and foliage - further back, a little sketched landscape with a cube-shaped house stretches out before a bright horizon. Macke has combined the secluded love story with abstract-ornamental forms. He has successfully created an intimate and harmonious chromatic fantasy which seems to precisely correspond to the ideals of Der Blaue Reiter. Nature-based mysticism, exoticism and the project of an artistic and earthly paradise resonate as vivid ideas in this composition.
The “oriental couple” also proves to be a motif that appears multiple times in Macke's work. A preliminary formulation of the couple can be found in a small reverse glass painting from 1911, which is stylistically reminiscent of a colourful miniature. The distinctive way the seated figures turn towards one another can be explained through a long pearl necklace which binds them to each other and which they hold together in their hands (see Bartmann, op. cit., 1979, “Orientalisches Paar in Blumenlandschaft”, see comp. illus.). This can also still be recognised in the delicate preliminary drawing on our sheet. The motif of the couple here is additionally to be found in identical and prominently cited form in the 1912 oil painting “Entwurf für einen Wandteppich mit orientalischem Liebespaar” (Heiderich 435, 120 x 210 cm). This exceptionally large painting once hung, as described by Dietrich Erdmann in his memoirs, directly on the ground floor, in the entry hall of Macke's home in Bonn. It is now owned by the state of Germany and adorns the Federal Chancellery.
Peter Dering introduces his study on exotic motifs in the work of August Macke (Dering, op. cit., 1995, p. 9) with an epigraph by the poet Fernando Pessoa: “Fundamentally, one travels best by feeling.” The present composition also radiates this sense: “The image of the lover[s] gives concrete form to an idea of people who - in a particular exceptional situation - experience existence with the greatest concentration and most heightened intensity. Here, using means that are astonishingly simple in terms of motif, Macke achieves something that represents his specific contribution to Expressionism's heightened sense of life” (Dering, op. cit., 1995, p. 26). Along with what he experienced as a happy personal situation, which has surely also found its artistic expression here, there were also cheerful and playful components in this programmatic exoticism in Macke's work. The artist was friends with the Worringer family, who were planning a new tea salon in Cologne, and in this context the artist had envisioned three rooms, each with different decorations featuring motifs related to the Rococo, the Orient and “modern life”. World War I prevented its realisation, but in 1913 Macke had already gone ahead and given Emmy Worringer the “Indischer Brautzug” he had painted in coloured ink (also “Orientalische Jagd”, see Heiderich Aquarelle 367).