Style Imitating Art | Promenade by August Macke

About Style Imitating Art

Style Imitating Art is hosted by Salazar of 14 Shades of Grey, Shelbee of Shelbee on the Edge, and Marsha of Marsha in the Middle. Style Imitating Art challenges us to draw style inspiration from pieces of art. Every other Monday, one of the hosts, acting as presenter, selects an inspiration image that they will each post on their blogs. The following Monday, each host shares her art inspired outfit. Participants are invited to submit their art inspired outfits to the presenter by 10:00 p.m. EST on the Tuesday following the hosts’ art inspired outfit posts. The following day, Wednesday, the presenter will share all of the submissions on her blog.

You don’t have to be a blogger to join either! In fact, you don’t even have to join but you can still use the art to inspire an outfit just for the sake of trying something different. If you want to share your inspired outfit, we invite you do so on Instagram or any other social media platform that you prefer. Just be sure to tag Salazar, Shelbee, or Marsha or use #StyleImitatingArt so the hosts know you have joined. Go have some fun in your closets and join the SIA challenge next week!

This Week’s Presenter

Marsha chose this week’s artwork. Not knowing a lot about Expressionism, she went searching for something to inspire and educate, settling on this 1913 painting by German Expressionist painter August Macke. Although it is similar to Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which we previously featured as our art inspiration in August 2024, Marsha really liked the colors and lines in this work. As do I. I am also always a fan of a good spring weather promenade!

The Artwork

Promenade by August Macke

About the Artist: August Macke

August Robert Ludwig Macke was born in Meschede, Westphalia, Germany, on January 3, 1887, the only son of August Friedrich Hermann Macke, a building contractor and amateur artist, and his wife, Maria Florentine Adolph Macke, a farmer’s daughter. Soon after his birth, the family settled in Cologne where August studied at the Kreuzgymnasium from 1897-1900. At school, he met and became friends with future fellow artist Hans Thuar. In 1900, the Macke family moved to Bonn where thirteen year old August studied at the Realgymnasium. During his schooling in Bonn, he met siblings Elisabeth and Walter Gerhardt, who would eventually become his wife and brother-in-law.

The first artworks to make an impression on the younger August Macke included his father’s drawings, Japanese prints collected by Hans Thuar’s father, and the works of Swiss Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin. After Macke’s father died in 1904, August enrolled at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf where he studied under the tutelage of German landscape and genre painter Adolf Maennchen until 1906. In 1905, he also attended evening classes with German graphic designer, typographer, and illustrator, Fritz Helmut Ehmke. During this time period, Macke also did stage and costume design at the Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf and traveled to Northern Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Britain.

From 1907 until his untimely death in 1914, August Macke pursued his creative life in Bonn with a few trips to Switzerland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Tunisia. His 1907 trip to Paris helped form his painting style in the mode of French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism as well as Fauvism.

In 1909, at the age of 22, August Macke married 21 year old Elisabeth Gerhardt, a German memoir writer. The couple had a son, Walter, born in 1910, and a son, Wolfgang, born in 1913. Elisabeth was portrayed more than 200 times in her husband’s artworks. After Macke’s death, Elisabeth married her second husband, German journalist Karl Hermann Dietrich Lothar Erdmann, who died in 1939 in a World War II concentration camp.

In 1910, August Macke met Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky with whom he shared a non-objective aesthetic. He also became interested in the mysticism and symbolism implemented by Kadinsky and German painter and printmaker Franz Marc who created the artists’ collective called Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider).

In 1912, he met French artist Robert Delaunay whose chromatic Cubism influenced Macke’s work from that point forward. Macke traveled to Tunisia in April 1914 with fellow artists Paul Klee and Louis Moilliet. The exotic atmosphere of Tunisia formed the basis of Macke’s luminist approach that highlighted the final period of his artwork.  

With a primary concentration on expressing emotions and moods, Macke’s complete body of work is generally considered Expressionism with an overlap into Fauvism. Rather than producing objective depictions of reality, Macke focused on distortions of color and form, with his later works generally acknowledged as masterpieces.

August Macke’s thriving art career was cut short on September 26, 1914, at the front in Champagne, France, during the second month of World War I. He was just 27 years old. He was buried in the German Military Cemetery in Souain-Perthes-lès-Hurlus, France. His first son Walter died in 1927 at the age of 17 while Wolfgang lived until 1975, passing at the age of 62. Elisabeth died at the age of 89 on March 17, 1978, surviving both husbands and both of her children.

In 1991, Macke’s former home in Bonn was converted to the August-Macke-Haus, a museum dedicated to his life’s work.

About the Art: Promenade

Promenade is a 1913 oil painting on cardboard by August Macke. It measures 20.1 x 22.4 inches (51 x 57 cm) and is currently held at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich.

In the September 1913, Macke with his wife and son moved to Hilterfingen, Switzerland, where they spent 8 months living on Lake Thun. Chronologically, Promenade was the first painting created after settling in Switzerland as well as the first of Macke’s works to use the motif of a walk in a park near a bridge and water. According to his wife, Macke’s final paintings from this period exhibited “airiness of colors, wonderful luminosity, especially in the green tones of trees, transparency of heavenly blue, sunspots on the ground, where shades change from shining yellow to deep red-brown”. The figures he painted were devoid of any sharp contrasts with no outlines or clearly defined contours.

Meeting his 1910 goal of producing works that “praise nature”, Macke’s paintings created imagery that could be considered a modern man’s Paradise, depicting leisurely walks in city streets, scenes of serene relaxation in park settings, and other cheerful outdoor activities like swimming and sailing.

Wikipedia offers a lovely description of this painting.

“In the center of the composition is a young man, dressed in an elegant suit and with a summer hat, talking to a lady in a red dress and blue jacket, holding an umbrella. The couple seems fenced off from the environment, not noticing anything around. Their faces are only outlined, anonymized, and devoid of specific features. Another lady, wearing a hat with a white feather, is leaning against the railing of the bridge, and the same do other two men, to her left. The painting creates a feeling of blissful peace on a quiet, sunny day, where a person seems in harmony both with himself and with nature.”

Helpful Links:

• Wikipedia: August Macke
• Wikipedia: Promenade (Macke)
• Wikiart: Promenade by August Macke
• Daily Art Magazine-August Macke: Short and Colorful Life of a Promising Artist
• An Introduction to German Artist August Macke

About My Outfit

Now onto my outfit inspired by this painting.

I bought an adorable green on green floral dress during a thrifting adventure with my sister last spring. The print and color were absolutely perfect to represent the bold green background of trees in the painting. I really, really wanted to wear this dress for this challenge, but try as I might, I could not create any outfit that didn’t take me straight to Frumpville. As cute as the fabric is, the dress is an absolutely hideous style for my body. So I tossed it into my upcycle bin because I love it enough to eventually turn it into something wearable for me. I don’t have any upcycle ideas yet but I’m sure I will come up with something fabulous!

After about 5 different unsuccessful outfit attempts using the green floral dress, I found myself back at the drawing board. Since I didn’t have anything else to represent those gorgeous green trees other than some scarves, I focused on the central woman’s rust and blue ensemble.

Lately, I have been having fun with layering multiple dresses. I certainly have enough dresses in my closet room to wear more than one every day so why shouldn’t I start wearing them? There are only so many days in a year and our time on earth is limited so I am determined to wear more of my clothes before my time runs out. Hopefully, I have 50 more years of getting dressed but we know that’s never guaranteed. So I’ll be wearing all of my clothing to the fullest extent possible from this point forward.

For this layered dress look, I started with a long sleeve thrifted dress in a rusty color with a pretty floral print. Next I added an old cobalt blue thrifted dress that I’ve never worn before now. The blue dress is sleeveless and features a floral and paisley embroidery design on the bodice. I actually really liked just the two dresses together without the top shirt but the embroidery was not quite working for the purpose of this art challenge.

So I grabbed an old rust colored tie dye button down shirt as a topper meant to conceal the embroidery on the dress. I originally purchased this shirt at retail because I loved it. Then I found the identical shirt on a thrifting adventure for $1 so I bought it for a future upcycle project which I just completed last week. I will be sharing that new upcycled creation next Monday for our May Songful Style challenge.

Once I had the three long layers in place to mimic the lady’s layered dress and long jacket look, I once again found myself arriving in Frumpville. However, unlike the green floral dress, I was able to easily detour away from the Village of Frump with a few creative styling tricks. First, I added a colorful preloved belt to give the shapeless layers some structure around my waist. That helped a little but I still felt like I was swimming in long layers of shapeless fabric. Since I wanted my boots to be more visible beneath the maxi dress, I started by tying two little knows at the hem of the dress to lift it up. And then I just went knot crazy…trying knots at the hem of the shorter blue dress as well as the tails of my shirt front to create a super fun detail that took me out of Frumpville and straight into the World of Weird. But hey, weird is much more my vibe than frump!

Because the vibrant green dress let me down, I still needed some greens to represent the painted trees. So I tied together two different green floral scarves to create a longer print mixed scarf. One scarf is very old and the other is recently thrifted which features adorable lady bugs perched on green leaves.

There is a lot of black in the painting so I represented it with my old black tassel combat boots and my black straw boater hat. I wore rusty colored crochet earrings that sort of reminded me of the lady’s hair and I didn’t wear any necklaces with this outfit, which is rare for me, but there was enough going on that I decided the scarf was enough.

At first, I was not pleased with this layered outfit and had planned to style something different. But once I started sifting through the photos, I wasn’t hating the look as much as I did when I saw it in the mirror. So I stuck with it. Plus, it’s okay to share our outfit fails sometimes. We may even discover that they weren’t actually failures at all…just creative experimentation!

I hope you all have enjoyed this round of Style Imitating Art. Be sure to check out how Marsha and Salazar have styled their outfits inspired by August Macke’s Promenade. If you want to play along and create your own art inspired outfit, please submit your photos to Marsha (mlrbanks57@gmail.com) by 10:00 p.m. EST on Tuesday, April May 19, 2026, and she will feature your outfit in her style gallery on Wednesday, May 20, 2026.

Until then, happy styling! 

Keeping it on the edge, 

Shelbee