Alexej von Jawlensky
Russian officer turned Munich Expressionist, who painted the same head for thirty years.
Alexej von Jawlensky was born near Torzhok in 1864, served as an officer in the Imperial Russian army, and resigned his commission to study painting in Munich, where he arrived in 1896 with Marianne von Werefkin. He was central to the Neue Kunstlervereinigung and close to Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter circle, and by 1911 was making the heads that became his subject for life: frontal, symmetrical, in flat unmixed colour with heavy contours. Exile in Switzerland during the First World War narrowed the work further, into Variations, Abstract Heads and finally the Meditations, painted with crippled hands from arthritis until 1937. He died in 1941.
The pre-1914 Munich heads and landscapes lead by a considerable distance, with the Swiss Variations and the late Meditations forming distinct and much larger groups. Jawlensky was declared degenerate and works were confiscated, so provenance between 1933 and 1945 must be examined. He worked largely on board and paper rather than canvas, often in oil on card, and these supports warp, cockle and suffer at the edges. The catalogue raisonne prepared by Maria Jawlensky and the artist's descendants is the reference for attribution.
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