Oil on firm paper with the embossed canvas, laid on cardboard
Jawlensky 2177. Inscribed: "A. Jawlensky IV. 1937 N. 8." by Lisa Kümmel on verso of backing cardboard. 25,2 x 17,5 cm (9,9 x 6,8 in)Cardboard: 25,8 x 18,3 cm (10,1 x 7,4 in).

PROVENANCE: From the artist's estate.
Private collection Switzerland.
Galerie Rieder, Munich.

EXHIBITION: A Centennial Exhibition of Paintings by Alexej Jawlensky, Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York, February-March 1965, cat. no. 75.

Alexej von Jawlensky started his training as an artist in St Petersburg by studying with Ilya Repin, through whom he was introduced to Marianne von Werefkin and Helene Nesnakomoff, who would later become his wife. Accompanied by the two women, Jawlensky moved in 1896 to Munich, where he became acquainted with Vassily Kandinsky. Jawlensky travelled to France several times and in 1905 was able to show ten paintings at the Salon d’automne. In summer 1908 Jawlensky worked for the first time in Murnau with Kandinsky, Marianne von Werefkin and Gabriele Münter. There the idea was broached of founding the “New Munich Artists’ Society”, which the four painters joined with other Munich artists in 1909. December that year saw their first group show in Munich. Two years later the “Blauer Reiter” was launched as a new big idea for artistic collaboration. When the first world war broke out in 1914, Jawlensky was deported from Germany because he was a Russian national. He moved with his family and Marianne von Werefkin to St. Prex on Lake Geneva and stayed in Switzerland until 1921. There he began on his abstract heads in 1918. Due to the onset of severe arthritis in 1929, Jawlensky became crippled and found it increasingly difficult to paint. In 1933 he was proscribed by the National Socialist regime and forbidden to show his work. The following year Jawlensky began on a series of “Meditations” in small formats.
Nowhere in his work are Alexej von Jawlensky’s motifs “more russian” than they are in his Meditations. Jawlensky’s exploration of the visual aspects of the portrait ends in a discussion of the likeness as such, which leads to the icon in the actual sense of the word. With almost religious fervour and marked by illness, Jawlensky created a type of picture in the late 1930s that is unmistakably his and is solely associated with his work. The Meditations he often painted in quite rapid sequence at that time are the expression of his being, which was deeply rooted in religion in its quest for the purity of the transcendental going beyond the torment of mundane existence. In his Meditations, Jawlensky returned to the origins of Russian art, the icon, which corresponded to his idea of the ectype because its expression was deindividualised. Even in the numerous variations to which Jawlensky subjected his Meditations, the basic type remains the same. It is the icon, which, once viewed, develops of itself magical properties so that it needs no particular interpretation.
Seventy-two works of Jawlensky’s were confiscated as “degenerate” in 1937. Four years later, in 1941, Jawlensky died in Wiesbaden. [KD].