Postcard with the work Alexej Jawlensky, Mystischer Kopf: Mädchenkopf (frontal), 1918 by the painter Alexej Jawlensky, published in connection with Louisiana's exhibition in 2025. This is the period where Jawlensky increasingly turns to the portrait as a motif, which in his case takes on a colourful, stylized expression, where particularly large eyes stand out as a dominant factor.
Though closely associated with the European avant-garde movements at the beginning of the 20th century, the painter Alexej Jawlensky (1864-1941) seems to have found his very own artistic voice rather late in life. This exhibition focuses on Jawlensky's path towards a highly distinctive expression in the form of his small, beautiful and mysterious meditations devoted almost exclusively to painting the same subject over and over again; a face.
Alexej Jawlensky was born into a regimental family in Russia in 1864, and initially opted for a military career himself, which he, however, chose to abandon in favor of the arts. In 1889 he began studying at the art academy in St. Petersburg, where he met the painter Marianne von Werefkin, who became his partner and supporter for many years. Together, the couple moved to Munich, where Jawlensky attended a private painting school with, among others, Wassily Kandinsky.
The first chapter of the exhibition in fact focuses on Jawlensky's connection to the art scene in Munich at the beginning of the 20th century. Together with Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter and Werefkin, he settled for a period in Murnau in Upper Bavaria and developed his highly expressive landscape paintings here.
Variations
The exhibition's second chapter takes its point of departure in Switzerland, where he, as a Russian, was forced to move into exile after the outbreak of the First World War. Here he and Werefkin settled by Lake Geneva, and as he did not have an actual studio, he painted the view from his window over and over again. These images are called variations and represent the beginning of Jawlensky’s interest in serial images, in the repetition of the motif. The more he painted, the more his works seemed to lose their connection to the “seen”, to the outside world. The image’s own logic took over and became the governing factor.
Meditations
The exhibition’s third chapter deals with Jawlensky’s final years in Germany during the 1930s. In the last two decades of his life, it is the repetition of the motif that keeps him preoccupied. Already in Switzerland he began painting faces serially – and these were to become his primary practice and the original contribution to art history. The Meditations can be viewed as a sort of happy conclusion for an artist who had sought almost all his life to connect his spiritual convictions with the act of painting. He created around a thousand of these very beautiful and mysterious small meditations, all consisting of the same black grid of a face interspersed with color combinations. This was all that his arthritic hands would allow for him to do, but in a way this was all he could wish for. He had, to a large extent, succeeded in his life’s work.
Dimensions: Dimensions: A5 (14.8 cm x 21 cm)
See all postcards here