HUMLEBĈK.- The painter Alexej Jawlensky (1864-1941) was a late bloomer whose serial works left a lasting mark on art history. With over 60 works on loan from leading European museums and private collections, a new exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art takes a close look at the last 20 years of the artist’s working life. This period, Jawlensky devoted almost exclusively to painting the same subject over and over again: a face.
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The face was an ideal subject for Jawlensky to express his spiritual thoughts. Over time it became almost completely abstract, culminating is his last series, his Meditations, when his hands were crippled by arthritis. These late works remain a singular and original contribution to art history.
The exhibition first looks at Jawlensky’s links to the Munich art scene in the early 20th century leading up to World War I. Jawlensky was in a relationship with the painter Marianne Werefkin and was a close friend of Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter. In the vibrant, highly stimulating milieu of Southern Germany, Werefkin and Jawlensky were at the heart of salon conversations and experiments in developing a new artistic expression.
“From age 50 and until his death, Jawlensky painted utterly unique series of works that have left a distinctive mark on art history. The exhibition zeroes in on the story of this relatively late artistic breakthrough.” -- Mathias Ussing Seeberg, Louisiana curator and curator of this exhibition.
Variations
When World War I broke out in 1914, Jawlensky was forced to flee to Switzerland. As a Russian citizen, he could not remain in Germany. This displacement marks the beginning of a crucial artistic development, and Jawlensky was soon demonstrating remarkable originality. This inflection point provides the main focus of the exhibition.
Because he had no studio, he repeatedly painted the view from his window. These paintings, which he called Variations, mark the beginning of Jawlensky’s interest in serial images of the same subject. With each repetition, the paintings drifted further from the visible world, guided instead by an internal logic. For the rest of his life, the relationship between repetition and variation was his artistic project.
It was also in Switzerland that Jawlensky began painting faces serially. This became his primary practice for the last 20 or so years of his working life. Variations of faces constitute the majority of works in this exhibition. Jawlensky modelled his art on the Russian Orthodox icons that he and many others at the time collected. As the artist described his interest in the face, “I found it necessary to find a form for the face, because I had come to understand that great art can only be painted with religious feeling. And that I could only bring to the human face.”
“Jawlensky’s Variations is one of the first radical serial artworks. As such, he dismantled the fundamental art-historical notion of the unique work with which a ‘great artist’ has struggled. Jawlensky abolished the ‘masterpiece.’” – Mathias Ussing Seeberg
Meditations
Jawlensky’s final years as a painter in 1930s Germany is a major and final focus of the exhibition. The Nazis banned him from exhibiting his art, and his crippling arthritis made it almost impossible for him to paint. Clutching the brush with both hands, he was just able to make small paintings every day, his so-called Meditations. As Jawlensky wrote a friend, “God knows how long I shall be able to hold a brush. I work with ecstasy and with tears in my eyes and I go on until darkness falls and envelops me.”
The Meditations are small paintings of the same simplified face, rendered in black lines resembling a cross. On this template, Jawlensky painted endlessly varied colour combinations. In all, he painted more than 1000 of these paintings. Jawlensky was convinced of their importance, writing, “And now I leave these small but, to me, important works to the future and to people who love art.”
Jawlensky’s late Meditations have had a profound impact on younger generations of artists. Despite their small scale, they invite comparison to both colour field painting and action painting. The American artist James Turrell (b. 1943) was inspired by Jawlensky’s late works, and the artist-composer John Cage (1912-1992) owned three Meditations by Jawlensky, which he acquired as a young, aspiring composer in the United States in the 1930s. After he bought his first work, he wrote a short letter in broken German to Jawlensky: “I’m overjoyed because I’ve bought one of your pictures. Now it is in me. I write music. You are my teacher.” Artists today continue to draw inspiration from Jawlensky’s paintings. The catalogue for this exhibition features an essay by the Danish artist Alexander Tovborg (b. 1983) on his relationship to Jawlensky’s work.
The first major presentation of the artist in Scandinavia, the Louisiana’s exhibition follows a series of shows devoted to overlooked positions in early 20th-century art. In recent years, the museum has showcased such artists as Sonia Delaunay, Gabriele Münter and Marsden Hartley, who all travelled and mingled in more or less the same circles. In 1913, all three showed alongside Jawlensky at the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon in Berlin. Moreover, Louisiana exhibitions of Hilma af Klint and Paula Modersohn-Becker, along with a number of group exhibitions, have furthered that aim.
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