Flowers in the garden, clivia and geraniums

Throughout 1911, Macke was confronted with various artistic influences, including the abstraction of the 'Blue Rider'. The works of this period are therefore not stylistically uniform, different approaches stand side by side. "Flowers in the garden, Clivia and pelargoniums" follows on from the Tegernsee still lifes of 1909-10 and can be seen as a last step in Macke's 'fauvistic phase' and his engagement with Matisse. Strong, saturated shades of green dominate the picture and have absorbed all light in their color in every single stylized form of the foliage. The effect of painterly density is increased by the exciting contrast of the three bright red flowers, the clay-red flower pots and the purple base, which slides compactly under the leaves. In this still life, an actually undemanding natural detail from Macke's garden in Bonn takes on an almost distressing shape due to the intensity of the pure colors. Despite all the carpet-like, decorative depiction of the lush green plants, the specific fascination of Macke's painterly homage to Matisse remains the trust in the spatial effect of the color. In his own words, he was more and more concerned with "finding the space-forming energies of colors". A little later Macke will look for solutions to this goal in his examination of Cubism and Futurism, before he finds independent, prismatic color energies in his mature paintings from 1913. Image and description made available by the Municipal gallery in the Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau Munich CC BY-SA 4.0