JAWLENSKY, GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST by Joan K. Yanni

JAWLENSKY, GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST

by Joan K. Yanni

In a Happy Mood, a painting by the artist Alexei Jawlensky, was installed in the 20th-century European gallery during the summer. A small painting, it could easily be overlooked. Yet its artist was one of the important members of the German Impressionists, showed with the Blue Rider, and, with Kandinsky, Klee and Feininger, exhibited in America as one of the Blue Four.

Jawlensky (1864-1941) was Russian, born in Kuslovo of an aristocratic family. He was educated at the Moscow Cadet School, but at the age of twenty-five abandoned the military for art and the St. Petersburg Academy. At thirty-two, dissatisfied with Russian realist painting, he and a group of Russian artists emigrated to Munich, the "Paris" of Germany.

In Munich Jawlensky lived the comfortable life of an educated Russian émigré, with enough money to allow him to pursue his own identity in art without the need to sell his paintings. He and his friends enrolled in the atelier of Anton Azbé, an innovative and creative teacher. Vasily Kandinsky was later to enroll in the school, as was Paul Klee. To escape from the school routine of head and figure drawing, Jawlensky began to paint landscapes in his studio, experimenting with color and form.

In 1905 he traveled to Brittany and Provence, then Paris, where he became acquainted with the paintings of Gauguin and Van Gogh and even painted for a time with Matisse, all fore-runners of Expressionism. In this atmosphere his own style began to evolve. He painted in flat, simple shapes, using bold, contrasting primary or secondary colors and dark outlines to unify them. He used some techniques of the Fauves but held on to his Russian mystical traditions and background.  

In Germany art was changing. A group of artists calling themselves The Bridge had been formed in Dresden as a reaction against objective painting. Founded in 1904 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the group believed in expressing subjective and emotional feelings, using distortions for emotional effect. Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde were members of The Bridge.

In 1909, influenced by The Bridge and dissatisfied with the exhibition possibilities in Munich, Jawlensky and Vasily Kandinsky founded the New Artists' Association of Munich. They sought the simplification of form and the elimination of nonessentials. "A work of art is a world of its own, not an imitation of nature," Jawlensky said.

By 1911 Kandinsky had formed still another group, The Blue Rider, which included painters such as Franz Marc, Karl Hofer, and Paul Klee. Jawlensky exhibited in the third show of these artists. In 1912 "expressionism" was first used to describe this art.

By 1914 Jawlensky had established his reputation as a member of a new generation of German artists. But his life was to change: the outbreak of World War I forced him to leave Germany because of his Russian nationality, and he settled in St. Prex, Switzerland, forced to leave behind his luxurious studio and most of his possessions.  His new studio had a single window, and through the war years he painted a series of Variations, pictures of his limited view. The works are lonely and reflective and became more and more abstract. However, unlike Kandinsky,  Jawlensky never created completely non-objective art, but based his abstractions on natural subjects.

In 1916 he met Emmy "Galka" Scheyer, a young art student who became his champion. She arranged sales of his work and seemed to have been the impetus for new vigor in his art. He began a series of mystical, semi-abstract heads: a vertical near the center of the picture represents the nose, horizontals represent eyes, eyebrows and a mouth. He used warm, bright colors, against deep, cool blues and greens. Color and form reflected his emotional moods, the seasons, and even sound, for he believed in the correlation between music and colors. Lines in the faces were designed to resemble crosses, icons and the like, giving the work religious and mystical overtones. He painted variations on these heads from 1921 to 1935; In a Happy Mood (1932) is one of these.

In 1922 Jawlensky settled in Weisbaden. Two years later Scheyer formed the Blue Four group with Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Klee and their friend, American Lyonel Feininger, and set out for the United States to promote their work. Though the exhibitions were successful, they did not bring financial relief. In 1933 the Nazis forbid Jawlensky to show his work in Germany. He continued to paint, however, till 1939, when arthritis forced him to stop. He died in 1941.

Source: Anne Mochon, Alexei Jawlensky: From Appearance to Essence; Hans Roethel: The Blue Rider; Leonard Hutton Gallery catalog, The Blue Four.

MAG's expressionist paintings include Pechstein's Ripe Wheat Fields, Kandinsky's watercolor Pentagon, Klee's watercolor Fairy Tales, George Grosz's The Wanderer, Klees Van Dongen's Portrait of a Woman, and Feininger's Zirchow IV.