Van Gogh • Artist Biographies • Alexej von Jawlensky

Alexej von Jawlensky

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Alexei von Jawlensky was born in Kuslovso, Russia. In keeping with family tradition, he entered the Moscow military academy at the age of eighteen. During this time, however, he also dabbled at painting and attended the St. Petersburg Academy of Art. While on vacations, he often visited the estate of a young painter, Marianne von Werefkin, with whom he emigrated to Munich in 1986. In Munich he enrolled in the Art Academy, of which Kandinsky was the director. Jawlensky's studio as well as the salon that von Werefkin would come to hold, soon became gathering places for young artists with new ideas.

Jawlensky's meeting with Kandinsky was to have a profound effect on the young painter's artistic sensibilities. He was also very taken with the work of Van Gogh, Cezanne and, most importantly, Matisse, whom he discovered during his travels in France. Jawlensky incorporated Matisse 's powerful use of pure color in his landscapes, still lives and portraits. In 1912 he joined the Blaue Reiter, but when World War I broke out, he was forced to leave Germany, and for several years he lived in Switzerland, painting modest landscape scenes from his studio.

It was while he was in Switzerland that Jawlensky developed the form of art that was to bring him ultimate fulfillment. With fervent color he painted landscapes and large heads. The repetition of these themes took on an increasingly symbolic and meditative quality. In the final version of his style-dating from around 1917 until his death-he painted only heads: the human face as a simple geometrical design, an object of religious mediation reduced to a figure as simple as the cross. Jawlensky made of his art a modern religious icon, drawn from the piety of his Russian Orthodoxy.