The spring of 1911 transformed artist Alexei Jawlensky

The Russian expressionist painter Alexei Jawlensky described the spring of 1911 as a turning point in his art. Three vibrant works he created in a subsequent period of creative genius would make their way to SLAM. 

Jawlensky studied under several of Eastern Europe’s leading artists, including history painter Ilya Repin and realist Anton Ažbe. As Jawlensky developed as an artist, the subjects of his works took on a new meaning. He wrote in a letter, “Apples, trees, human faces are for me only suggestions to see something else in them—the life of color seized with a lover’s passion.” The portraits became focused on heads instead of full bodies. His figures grew more abstract and simplified, with facial features becoming lines and shapes that varied only slightly from painting to painting. 

In the spring of 1911, the vibrant color and salt air of Germany’s Baltic seaside exposed Jawlensky to a newfound inner ecstasy, according to his memoir. Inspired by artists Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh, Jawlensky’s heads were uniformly bright, bearing only a passing reference to nature. The artist later recalled, “In 1911, I found personal form and color and painted powerful pictures of full figures and heads.” 

Jawlensky’s portraits, now referred to as his “prewar heads,” were vastly different to anything produced by his contemporaries. Art critic Will Grohmann described the radically reductive works as products of “a need to deepen inner expression,” reflecting Jawlensky’s previous desires to relay emotion that could neither be written nor spoken.  

There are three prewar heads in SLAM’s collection: Egyptian, Prophet (Sibyl), and Spring.  

Egyptian and Prophet (Sibyl) are characterized by loose brushwork, simplified shapes, and a nonnaturalistic color palette. The woman in Egyptian is embellished with a gold earring, a pink flower, and a dark veil in her hair. Though these were not portraits of specific individuals, they carried general narrative content; for example, the imposing dark bar covering the sybil’s mouth may emphasize the importance of speech to her. The ancient Greeks believed sibyls were oracles who delivered messages from the gods.

Departing from the artist’s usual naming conventions, which tended to be descriptive or identifying, Spring is open to interpretation. 

Bright hues of yellows, greens, and pinks give the subject’s face an almost flowerlike appearance. The woman’s blushing red cheeks and bold mouth, outlined in yellow, suggest love and affection—feelings associated with spring. The woman may be a personification of the season; European artists had personified the four seasons as women for centuries. Jawlensky offered no narrative context alluding to who the woman may be, as opposed to Egyptian or Prophet (Sibyl). 

Jawlensky’s artistic production was abruptly interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. The artist was exiled from Germany in 1914 and moved to Switzerland before returning to Germany after the war in 1921. There, his heads became even more abstract and took on a religious subtext, reflecting the horrors of the recent war. In a letter to Dutch painter Willibrord Verkade, the artist explained, “I understood that the artist must express through his art, in forms and colors, the divine within him.”

This information was adapted from Melissa Venator’s essay, “Alexei Jawlensky,” which appears in the collection catalogue German Expressionism: Paintings at the Saint Louis Art Museum. The catalogue offers a close look at the Museum’s collection of Expressionist paintings made between 1905 and 1939. It is available for purchase online and in Museum shops.