August Macke

August Macke 1887-1914
Lady in a Green Jacket

When we were young, our embryonic critical acumen attributed to some of our art-making friends qualities they did not really possess or would ever realize. The monstrous harvest of the First World War culled artists whose early work we regard with especial grief (Gaudier-Brzeska, Macke). Artists who lived many years, Matisse and Braque are two, voyaged through periods and stages and styles, almost to appear to have become different persons.

August Macke presumes he’ll live for decades, and that on the other side of his many years of painting he may become an actor, or a wanderer, or a playwright. But here his spirit and gut clench, fearing that she will be run headlong into a subservient role, hobbled by weak men, and bound fatally to the cowardice that has been imposed upon her blood. In Tunisia he saw a street beggar, a girl of fourteen, pick the pocket of a British tourist, then swing the wallet in front of the victim’s eyes with a gay hoot, before scampering out of sight. In Lyon, Tsiganes rambled in packs, as on the high seas seeking sluggish clippers, rolling the drunks, in this way: with choral songs of pleasure and accomplishment. The breadbaker’s shop is burned to the ground by his one moment of negligence, after which he hies his family to Paris, where he learns pastries of the most delicate kind, destined only for the bellies of the plutocrats. In mines and pits souls wither into grease, scriveners rot, men pound rocks to gravel, women desiccate. August Macke brings the mallet down, beats a rhythm of forgiveness and betrayal, and frees the vassals, feet in the boulevards dance, the bellows of the throng can from a distance sound only like song. In 1913, August Macke foresaw Paris in May of 1968. He added the enzyme luciferase (from fireflies) to pigments, and,
so that girls could say to the boys in bars
who fan their feathers,
perm their hair,
glisten their muscles,
and swell their codpiece:
fuck you!,
August Macke invented green.