August Robert Ludwig Macke (3 January 1887 - 26 September 1914) was a German Expressionist painter August Macke was one of the leading members of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). He lived during a particularly innovative time for German art which saw the development of the main German Expressionist movements as well as the arrival of the successive avant-garde movements which were forming in the rest of Europe. Macke's career was cut short by his early death in the second month of the First World War at the front in Champagne, France, on 26 September 1914.