James Picard - Artist of the Month, December 2008: Alexei von Jawlensky

***December 2008***

Alexei von Jawlensky
March 13,1864 – 15 March 15, 1941

Alexei Jawlensky was born in Kuslovso, Russia. In keeping with family tradition, he entered the Moscow military academy at the age of eighteen. While stationed at St. Petersburg, he studied at the Academy of Art and after realizing that his passion was in painting, he left the military to attend the Azbe School in Munich, taking frequent study trips to Provence and Brittany. While on vacations, he often visited the estate of a young painter named Marianne von Werefkin, he later moved with her to Munich Germany in 1886.

In Munich he enrolled in the Art Academy where the great abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky was the director. 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. In 1905 the Alexei was included in the Salon d'Automne in Paris, where he met Henri Matisse whom he was greatly influenced by and who would have an impact on his painting for the rest of his life. Jawlensky incorporated Matisse 's powerful use of pure colour in his landscapes, still lives and portraits.

In 1912 he became affiliated with Der Blaue Reiter painting group and he began to paint and explore his artwork like never before. His studio soon became a meeting place for artists who shared ideas and inspired a new form of abstraction. With the onset of World War I, Jawlensky 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. He moved back to Germany in 1921 and continued painting and in 1924 he joined Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Lyonel Feininger to form Der Blaue Vier (“The Blue Four”)

Despite ill health and his terrible arthritis Alexei Jawlensky continued to develop his style of painting and worked mainly on portraiture and human heads adding unusual colour combinations and at times abstracting the face into a mere symbol of expression. He continued painting and exhibiting with his friends in the “Blue Four” until arthritis forced Jawlensky to abandon painting all together. With his health failing and being unable to paint, Jawlensky spent the last years of his life in a state of severe depression. He died on the fifteenth of March, 1941 in Wiesbaden, Germany.

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