August Macke

"In war we are all equal, but among a thousand good men, a bullet hit an irreplaceable one. We painters know well that with the loss of his harmony [of August Macke], the color in German art will become many shades paler.."

"I have been in Munich this week, and got to know the whole Neue Künstlervereinigung at Tannhausers [gallery] – Jawlensky, Kandinsky etc. For Munich they are very, very good, I was interested."

"I have been to [the gallery] Hagen, saw two Matisses, which enchanted me. A large collection of Japanese masks. Sublime! Neue [Künstler] Vereinigung were hung in a bad light. ... Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Bechteleff and Erbslöh have immense artistic sensibility. But the means of expression are to big for what they have to say. The sound of their voice is so good, so fine, that what is being said get lost. Consequently a human element is missing. They concentrate, too much, I think, on form. There is much to be learnt from their efforts. But early things by Kandinsky, and a few by Jawlensky too, seem a little empty to me. And Jawlenskys heads looked at me a little bit too much with colors. With blue and green. I hope you understand what I mean."

"He [Robert Delaunay] gives movement itself [in his pictures], the Futurists only illustrate movement."

"Time has a large part to play in looking at a picture. A picture (a stupid empty surface to begin with) gets covered in the course of its creation by a rhythmically measured network of colors, lines and dots, which evokes in its final form a total of living movement. The eye jumps from a blue to red, to green (even if there is only a change of form), to a black line, suddenly comes upon a sharp white eruption, follows it, floats on to... It is impossible to take it all in at once. Time is inseparable from surface."

"It was the desire for living, vital expression which built Gothic cathedrals, which created Mozart sonatas. I believe it is going to stay that way for long time to come."

"The harvest of your Summer [1910] is displayed on our walls. I like some of them terrifically. The certainty with which most of it is done makes me feel ashamed of myself. The thousand steps that I need to take for a picture are of no advantage, as I sometimes foolishly used to think. Things must change."

"Germany today certainly has no idea what it owes to this young, dead painter—how much he accomplished, how much he succeeded at. Everything he touched with his skilled hands, anyone who came near him, came alive - every kind of material, and above all, the people whose imagination he magically captured with his ideas. How much we painters in Germany owe to him! What he has sowed will still bear fruit, and we, as his friends, want to make sure that they do not remain a secret."

"In the Summer of 1908 he [Macke] returned to Paris, where he was most struck by Cezanne, Seurat and Paul Gauguin. He went to Paris again in 1909, this time in the company of Louis Moilliet. Immediately after this he went to the Tegernsee, a lake in Northern Bavaria. ... he spent a year there, during which, on a visit to Munich, he discovered Marc. ... Mackes encounter with the Blaue Reiter [in Munich], and his rejection of the groups dramatization of the content of art, led him to clarify his idea of what painting meant for him, namely giving an artistic form to impressions of the visible, material world."

"Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism, abstract painting, are only names given to a change which our artistic thinking wants to make and is thinking. Nobody has ever painted fallen raindrops suspended in the air, theyve always been depicted as streaks (even the cave-men drew herds of reindeer in the same way). Now people are painting cabs rattling, lights flickering, people dancing, all-in the same way (this is how we all see movement). That is thew whole frightfully simple secret of Futurism. Its very easy to prove its artistic feasibility, for all the philosophizing that has been raised against it. Space, surface and time are different things, which ought not to be mixed together, is the continuous cry. If only it were possible to separate them. I cant do it."

"The new discovery that I have made in painting is the following. There are chords of colors, lets say a certain red and green, which move, shimmer when you look at them. Now if youre looking at a tree in a landscape, you can either look at the tree, or at the landscape, but not both, because of the stereoscopic effect. Now, when you are painting something three-dimensional, the chromatic sound which shimmers is the three-dimensional effect of colour, and when you paint a landscape, and the green foliage shimmers a little with the blue sky showing through it, that happens because the green is on a different plane from the sky in nature too. Finding the space-shaping energies of colour, instead of contenting ourselves with a dead chiaroascuro, is our finest task."

"Everything he paints is a search, a self-development, a striving for understanding of the most profound kind. He is still experimenting, not executing, he often paints two or three pictures in a day, and his sketchbooks are already innumerable. He lives in a continuous, sharp criticism of his work and is thus constantly changing and developing. He has, by nature, absolutely no interest in the transcendental. His sensitivity is elemental and deep. He experiences – I would say – those many moments of ecstasy, the alternation between the greatest happiness and the deepest depression, which are the lot of a great artist, who must learn the whole gamut of feeling from his own experience."