Postcard with the work Variation: Dämmerung c. 1916. by the painter Alexej Jawlensky, published in connection with the Louisiana exhibition in 2025. At the beginning of the 20th century, together with Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter and von Werefkin, Jawlensky settled for a period in Murnau in Upper Bavaria and developed his highly expressive landscape paintings here.
The painter Alexej Jawlensky (1864-1941) was part of the European avant-garde movements of the early 20th century, but only really found his own artistic voice late in life. The exhibition shows Jawlensky's path towards this distinctive expression, which takes the form of small, mystical meditations.
Alexej Jawlensky was born into a family of officers in Russia in 1864, and initially chose a military career, which he abandoned in favor of art. In 1889 he began studying at the Academy of Fine Arts 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.
Variations
The second chapter of the exhibition begins in Switzerland, where he was forced to move into exile, as he, as a Russian, could not stay in Germany after the outbreak of World War I. Here he and Werefkin settled down by Lake Geneva, and since he did not have a proper studio, he painted, among other things, the view from his window over and over again. These pictures are called variations and represent the beginning of Jawlensky's interest in serial pictures, in the repetition of the motif. The more he painted, the more they lost their connection to the "seen", to the external world. The picture's own logic took over and became the governing one.
Meditations
The third chapter of the exhibition deals with Jawlensky's last years in 1930s Germany. In the last twenty-plus years of his life, it was the repetition of the motif that preoccupied him. Already in Switzerland, he began to paint faces serially, and this became his primary project during these years of his life and work – and it is with these works that he left his mark on art history. The Meditations was a happy culmination for an artist who had spent almost his entire life trying to connect his spiritual beliefs with his painting. He made about a thousand of these very beautiful and mysterious little meditations. They all consisted of the same completely simplified face painted in black with different color combinations filled in between. He could do no more than that, because his arthritic hands would no longer allow it, but he did not want to do any more either. In a sense, he had succeeded in his life's work.
Measurements:
W: 59,4 x H: 84,1 cm (A1)