The lady in the green jacket

"The Lady in the Green Jacket" - one of the first paintings by Mack, he wrote in Hilterfingen . And here, as in many paintings of the late period, the impressions of Robert Delaun's semi-abstract “Windows” were taken as a basis, and without giving up figurativeness.

The theme of the painting is a walk in the park. Macke, from the beginning of his creative activity, developed this favorite motive, and in his later works this motive acquires the degree of the highest perfection. The artist creates around the characters a beautiful world in its unreality, they themselves match the fabulous atmosphere: ladies in elegant narrow dresses and fashionable hats and men in dark suits and bowlers . Macke himself described the heroes of his paintings with strollers in the open air: “A common attribute of male bowler, and I put bowlers on them. Women with slender necks and hips are holding umbrellas in their hands that protect them from light. ” Individuality is excluded, faces are shown schematically, uniform clothing, which further enhances the anonymity of the characters ^[1] .

In the center of the composition is a woman in a green jacket, her figure, half-turned and cut off for generations, divides the canvas into two vertical parts. On the middle plan, under the canopy of tree crowns, two couples are walking, two of them - a man and a woman, leaning on the parapet, watch the flow of the river. The branches of trees move away from each other almost at a right angle, their drawing was borrowed by Macke from the Treatise on Painting compiled from the theoretical works of Leonardo da Vinci . "Treatise" Macke studied during his stay in Berlin in the years 1907-1908, at the time of his study at Lovis Korint . Houses on both banks of the river are made in simplified forms, the mountains in the distance are presented in the form of triangles. Such a reduction of familiar objects to simple geometric forms was characteristic of early Cubism , including Delone's works ^[1] .

The artist seemed to have stopped the run of time, the impression of peace is reinforced by the “warm autumn colors” (Möller) of the picture. Their shine is enhanced by working on the contrast of complementary colors . Illuminated evenly from all sides, the figures of people seem to merge with the outside world ^[1] .

• August Macke. - Köln: DuMont Buchverlag, 1988. - ISBN 3-7701-2209-7 .
• Vriesen, Gustav. August Macke. - Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1957.