Turkish Cafe (I) 1914

August Macke made this small painting, Turkish Cafe, sometime before 1914. It’s like he’s pulled the scene together through simple shapes and colors, and then let that inform the whole image. The way Macke handles the paint here—thin layers, kind of transparent in places—adds to this feeling of immediacy. You can almost see the process, the decisions being made. Take a look at the vertical red stripe which dominates the foreground. It's both a structural element, like a pillar in the cafe, and also a purely abstract form holding the composition together. The way the colors bleed and blend creates a sense of depth and atmosphere. Macke was friends with folks like Kandinsky and Marc, and you can see some of that influence in his work, but he had his own distinct approach. Like other artists of the time, he embraced art as something that could be ambiguous, something that could hold multiple meanings and interpretations.