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Lot Essay
In August 1914 Jawlensky was compelled by the outbreak of the war to leave Munich and find refuge with his family in St Prex, a small village on the Leman Lake. This traumatic experience had a dramatic effect on his painting. The isolation of exile pushed him to develop a new pictorial language, where the fauve explosion of colour had a structure superimposed upon it as he tried to refine a composition by a successive distillation of his subject. He would paint the same subject over and over again until he had purified the composition to an abstract 'essence'. This is apparent in his landscapes of the period which move from relatively formal representation to abstract colourist patterns.
In the St Prex years, Jawlensky's portraits underwent the same deconstruction as his landscapes. From the more figurative heads of the end of the decade, bursting with colour barely controlled by the powerful contour lines, Jawlensky moved over to the purer, more austere compositions of 1916, reaching the climax with the Mystische Kpfe of 1917. This crescendo towards abstraction was a result of a new mystique of colour, elaborated by Jawlensky under the influence of his recent fascination with yoga meditation. Recalling his quest for a more spiritual pictorial language, the artist wrote: 'I painted these 'Variations' for some years, and then I found it necessary to find a form for the face, for I realised that great art should only be painted with religious feeling. And that was something that I could bring only to the human face' (Letter to Pater Willibrord Verkade, Wiesbaden, 12 June 1938).
With its more subdued chromatic contrasts, the present picture perfectly exemplifies Jawlensky's passage towards his later, mystical portraits. Less overwhelming than in the early heads, the palette is subtly played around post-mannerist hues - a sophisticated repudiation of naturalism, in a quest for a more stylised abstraction.
In the St Prex years, Jawlensky's portraits underwent the same deconstruction as his landscapes. From the more figurative heads of the end of the decade, bursting with colour barely controlled by the powerful contour lines, Jawlensky moved over to the purer, more austere compositions of 1916, reaching the climax with the Mystische Kpfe of 1917. This crescendo towards abstraction was a result of a new mystique of colour, elaborated by Jawlensky under the influence of his recent fascination with yoga meditation. Recalling his quest for a more spiritual pictorial language, the artist wrote: 'I painted these 'Variations' for some years, and then I found it necessary to find a form for the face, for I realised that great art should only be painted with religious feeling. And that was something that I could bring only to the human face' (Letter to Pater Willibrord Verkade, Wiesbaden, 12 June 1938).
With its more subdued chromatic contrasts, the present picture perfectly exemplifies Jawlensky's passage towards his later, mystical portraits. Less overwhelming than in the early heads, the palette is subtly played around post-mannerist hues - a sophisticated repudiation of naturalism, in a quest for a more stylised abstraction.