When World War I broke out, Alexej von Jawlensky, as a Russian citizen, was forced to leave Germany in 1914. The artist went into exile in Switzerland with his partner Marianne von Werefkin and his companion Helene Nesnakomoff. Until 1917, they lived in a small house in Saint-Prex on Lake Geneva. This eventful time marked a turning point in his private life and his art: “In our little apartment there, I only had a small room to work in with a window. I wanted to paint my powerful, strongly colored pictures but couldn't. My soul didn't allow me this sensual painting, even though my work has a lot of beauty [...] I now began to look for a new path in art. It was a great work. [...] My formats became smaller.” (Alexej von Jawlensky, Erinnerungen, quoted from: https://www.lenbachhaus.de/digital/sammlung-online/detail/nacht-in-st-prex-30005164).
“My soul had been changed by much suffering, and that demanded finding different forms and colors to express what moved my soul [...] Through hard work and with the greatest concentration, I gradually found the right colors and forms to express what my spiritual self demanded.” (Alexej von Jawlensky, ibid., quoted from: Clemens Weiler, Alexej Jawlensky, Hanau 1970, p. 116).
Now, numerous abstract landscape representations are emerging, based on his immediate surroundings, the series of “Variations.” From October 1917, the artist also occupied himself with his favorite motif, the human head, and initially seems to have drawn on his brightly colored and expressively designed heads from the pre-war years, such as “Reife” (c. 1912, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich).
So the first, further developed “Mystical Heads” emerged, which in the following years formed a complex series of works that was relatively small in the context of his other serial works. In these works, Jawlensky simplifies the human face; the physiognomies are abstracted, de-individualized, and stylized: bold fields of color as well as striking monochrome lines and beams mark the eyebrows, mouth, bridge of the nose, cheeks, and hairline.
The work offered here focuses solely on the frontally aligned face. The strong, bright colors used here also attest to the influence of the French avant-garde at the time, particularly the “Fauves,” and further help the depictions overcome reality.
In their stylization, simplified motifs, and formal reduction, the “Mystical Heads” are a pioneering key moment in Jawlensky's programmatic path between figuration and abstraction, which was continued with the subsequent comprehensive groups of works, the “Faces of the Saviour” and the “Christ Heads,” and later in the “Abstract Heads” and finally in the highly simplified “Meditations,” which culminates in the greatest possible abstraction in the artist's oeuvre. In this exciting in-between space, the distinctiveness and extraordinary modernity of Jawlensky's unique painting still lie today. [CH]