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Lot Essay
At the outbreak of war in August 1914, Jawlensky had to leave Munich at 48 hours' notice, with his family and Marianne von Werefkin. The close colony of artists which they had befriended was suddenly disbanded. Shattered by the events, the foursome found refuge in St Prex, a small village on the Leman lake, where, thanks to A. von Khrushchov, a well-to-do friend living in Lausanne, they rented a few rooms in one of the houses in the village. Jawlensky found himself without a studio, forced to paint in an extremely confined space. Once settled in St Prex, he requested Cuno Amiet, who was still in Munich, to bring him van Gogh's La Maison du Pre Pilon - which he had bought in 1908 thanks to the mediation of Theo van Gogh's widow, his own Der Buckel I, and one of his portraits. As the artist recalled in his Memoir, 'Having fled to Switzerland on the last train and having been allowed to bring away only what we could carry by hand. My van Gogh I wanted absolutely to have with me in Switzerland, so I wrote to Amiet in Oschwand to ask whether he could possibly go to Munich and fetch it. And the dear, kind Amiet brought in 1914 not only my van Gogh but also two of my own works...' (ibid.). Crucially, this improvised gallery of beloved icons became the inspiration for Jawlensky's series painting.
Still inspired by the luminous landscape of the Mediterranean, which he had explored in the early months of 1914, Jawlensky was deeply fascinated by the transparent light of the lake. Yet the traumatic experience of resettlement would not allow him to simply resume his most recent Munich experiments. As he writes in his Memoirs: 'In the beginning at St Prex I tried to continue painting as I had in Munich, but something inside me would not allow me to go on with those ... powerful, sensual works. I realised that my soul had undergone a change as a result of so much suffering and that I had therefore to discover different forms and colours to express what my soul felt' (ibid.). He found these new 'forms and colours' outside his room window and overcame the logistic bounds of the his 'exile'. The frame of his rented room's window dictated the vertical structure of his new, utterly original series of landscapes. After these early St Prex experiments, the concept of the series became the centre of Jawlensky's oeuvre and his rigorous working method; at the basis of his inspiration was the depiction of the same subject, within the compass of the same format, painted in a continuous evolution towards his distilled compositional abstractions.
Grosse Variation is a perfect example of the unorthodox formal device he adopted in depicting the view from the window, and one of the earliest of the 1914 series. The colours are still fauve, and Jawlensky is deeply indebted to Matisse's colourist vocabulary and experiments with flattened perspective (fig. 1) which he adapts here in the harmonised contrasts between his acid greens, oranges and purples, all contained and given structure in the slender framework of the blooming garden.
Still inspired by the luminous landscape of the Mediterranean, which he had explored in the early months of 1914, Jawlensky was deeply fascinated by the transparent light of the lake. Yet the traumatic experience of resettlement would not allow him to simply resume his most recent Munich experiments. As he writes in his Memoirs: 'In the beginning at St Prex I tried to continue painting as I had in Munich, but something inside me would not allow me to go on with those ... powerful, sensual works. I realised that my soul had undergone a change as a result of so much suffering and that I had therefore to discover different forms and colours to express what my soul felt' (ibid.). He found these new 'forms and colours' outside his room window and overcame the logistic bounds of the his 'exile'. The frame of his rented room's window dictated the vertical structure of his new, utterly original series of landscapes. After these early St Prex experiments, the concept of the series became the centre of Jawlensky's oeuvre and his rigorous working method; at the basis of his inspiration was the depiction of the same subject, within the compass of the same format, painted in a continuous evolution towards his distilled compositional abstractions.
Grosse Variation is a perfect example of the unorthodox formal device he adopted in depicting the view from the window, and one of the earliest of the 1914 series. The colours are still fauve, and Jawlensky is deeply indebted to Matisse's colourist vocabulary and experiments with flattened perspective (fig. 1) which he adapts here in the harmonised contrasts between his acid greens, oranges and purples, all contained and given structure in the slender framework of the blooming garden.