The Many Faces of Alexei von Jawlensky (1864-1941)

A gallery of the greatest works of Alexei von Jawlensky.

Alexei von Jawlensky was a Russian born artist mainly painting in a German Expressionist style.

Jawlensky was born in Torzhok in western Russia. At age 18 he began military service, but managed to study art at the same time under the Russian realist painter Ilya Repin.

While studying with Repin, he met the artist Marianna von Werefkin, who became his mentor. Werefkin convinced Jawlensky to move from Russia to Munich to pursue a more radical direction to his work.

The pair moved to Munich in 1896 to study in the studio of Anton Abze. There they met Wassily Kandinsky, and Jawlensky was heavily influenced by his new theories and his move towards abstraction. In 1908, Jawlensky and Werefkin became members of the New Artists’ Association and then the Blauer Reiter group, with other German Expressionists.

Around this time Jawlensky also spent time with Henri Matisse, and with other German Expressionists Franz Marc, and the Swiss artists Ferdinand Hodler and Paul Klee. From this time on Jawlensky’s paintings featured a famously bright palette. Through the 1910s and into the 1920s he produced a number of series of portraits using this bright, non-naturalistic colour scheme. These started as heads with hats, hair etc., and gradually became more and more basic moving the focus wholly on to the face. These culminated in his ‘Mystical Heads’ and ‘Saviour’s Faces’ series shown here.

Jawlensky’s output drastically reduced from the late 1920s due to crippling arthritis. He died in 1941 at the age of 77.


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