About this work
**With the Parrots** drops you into one of August Macke's most characteristic scenes: the zoological garden as a stage for modern life. The composition features two men in dark suits and hats alongside three vivid blue parrots — the birds rendered with a chromatic intensity that immediately dominates the scene. The figures, smartly dressed and looking distinctly formal in comparison with the relaxed and vivid nature that surrounds them, are treated with Macke's signature economy of line: enough presence to anchor the scene, not enough detail to distract from it. The exotic creatures are ideally suited to his traditionally bright color schemes, and the array of birds brings a clear sense of energy and fun. The tension between the muted propriety of the suited figures and the electric blue of the parrots is the painting's quiet joke — and its real subject.
This work sits at the heart of the most productive and formally adventurous stretch of Macke's brief career. His meeting with Robert Delaunay in Paris in 1912 was a revelation; Delaunay's chromatic Cubism — which Apollinaire had called Orphism — influenced Macke's art from that point onwards.
The people and animals in Macke's zoological garden pictures are rendered as a harmonious and primal unity, an earthly idyll removed from the turbulence gathering in Europe. Society was distinctly reserved during the earliest parts of the 20th century, as displayed in the bearing of the figures making their way around the park, but the birds display a clear contrast to this. In that friction lies something quietly radical: Macke using bourgeois leisure as a canvas for exploring colour as pure feeling.
Executed in watercolour on paper, *With the Parrots* carries the luminous, slightly translucent quality that makes Macke's works on paper feel lit from within. It belongs in a room with good natural light — a reading room, a study, a hallway with a white wall — where the blue of the birds can shift through the day. Macke used colour to express and communicate universal aspects of human consciousness, and that intention reads easily even now: this is a painting about pleasure, about the surprise of beauty encountered in an ordinary afternoon, and about the strange dignity of standing very still beside something that isn't still
