About this work
*Indians on Horseback* is an oil painting executed in 1911 , and what greets the eye immediately is its charged, dreamlike atmosphere. The landscape depicts three figures and two horses, set against a backdrop of pointed and rounded mountains beneath a sky that shifts between darkness and gold, with huts visible in the middle distance. The figures are "Indians" as Macke imagined them — two mounted on horseback, the third standing and holding a lance adorned with blue, white, and red feathers.
The contours are painted with sharp definition, while the colours bleed freely across the flatter areas of the composition — a tension that gives the work its particular energy. Deep blues, greens, yellows, and oranges do more than describe a scene; they evoke a mood, a feeling of a stylised, otherworldly landscape.
The darkly glowing fantasy landscape, schematic flat forms, and diagonally leaning trees all carry echoes of Franz Marc's influence.
Painted in 1911, the work was created when Macke was under the influence of Cubism and had joined Der Blaue Reiter through his friendship with Franz Marc.
It was also here that Macke incorporated Cubist influences for the first time — albeit in a "moderate way" — with art historian Johannes Langner identifying the "schematic plastic form" characteristic of Cubism and a diagonal push of energies driving the composition to the left.
Macke's conception of Cubism was softer and more pictorial than his contemporaries'; and the motif of the "noble savage" itself connects to the Cubist-era craving for paradise — the desire, alive in European avant-gardes since Gauguin, to break with tradition and engage with the exotic. Art historians have noted that this work stands apart in Macke's oeuvre: alongside his other "Indian" paintings, it represents something unusual, created not from nature but from what one scholar called the "intellectual evocation of indigenous peoples."
The painting today belongs to the collection of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich.
On the wall, this painting rewards a room that can hold its intensity — a study, a library, or a darkly painted living space where saturated colour can breathe without competing. The mythic subject matter and compressed energy of the composition speak to viewers drawn to the early avant-garde: people who understand that modernism didn't begin with abstraction but with painters willing to charge recognisable scenes with pure feeling. Macke himself described painting as "a joy in nature" — and that exuberance, even in
