Sitting Nude with Pillow
This conversation is connected to Sitting Nude with Pillow.
August Macke painted Sitting Nude with Pillow in 1911, the year he joined Der Blaue Reiter alongside Kandinsky and Franz Marc. The figure sits with her back to the viewer on a pile of patterned cushions — blue, red, and gold — rendered in flat, bold strokes that owe as much to Matisse as to his German Expressionist peers. Macke had seen the Fauvists in Paris in 1909 and the influence is all over this painting: the simplified forms, the thick dark outlines, the unapologetic color. He was twenty-four when he made it. He would be dead three years later, killed in the second month of World War I.