The Russian-German painter Alexej von Jawlensky was something of a sponge. Born in 1864 and channeled toward a military career, he was 18 when he experienced an epiphany upon visiting the All-Russian Exhibition of Industry and Art. By 1896 he had abandoned the czar’s army and left St. Petersburg to crisscross Continental Europe, soaking in the avant-garde. In France, he analyzed the Post-Impressionist pictures of Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, experimented with sizzling color in the studio of Henri Matisse, and exhibited with the Fauves at their maiden Salon d’Automne. In Germany, he befriended Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, dabbled in Theosophy, and joined the Expressionist splinter group the Blue Rider.
And yet, as viewers will learn in “Alexej Jawlensky”—an exhibition that opens on January 30 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Copenhagen—it wasn’t until World War I drove Jawlensky into Switzerland, at age 50, that an original artist was born. Through some 60 paintings on loan, the exhibition traces his career crescendo.
“Jawlensky was in the middle of everything, yet generally plays a very marginal role in the history of modern art,” says Mathias Ussing Seeberg, the show’s curator. “I think one reason he doesn’t play a more central role is that people look at the wrong part of his output. He was very quick to understand some basic ideas and execute them very well, but maybe these early works aren’t the most original.
“His style I’m interested in is an approach from 1914 until he can no longer paint, in 1938. Maybe this work isn’t as spectacular, but it’s much more interesting. This is when he experiments with repetition and variation. And, of course, other artists did that, too, but they didn’t make a thousand of the same painting.” What Seeberg is referring to are Jawlensky’s “Variations” and “Meditations.”
The “Variations” began in 1914, when the exiled Russian decided to take an entirely new approach to his art, painting the same subject, such as the view from his window on Lake Geneva, over and over and over. As lines disappeared and color became the key structural device—not just a means of description—each image became increasingly symbolic, drifting further from the representational world.
The “Meditations” started in 1934, when the artist was 70, and continued for around four years, until his hands were so riddled with arthritis that he could no longer put brush to surface. Numbering around 1,000, these miniature, tightly cropped portraits, painted in a handful of solemn tones and with just a few powerful brushstrokes, abstract the face to the point where it resembles a crucifix. They fuse Jawlensky’s progressive ideas with the ancient mysticism of the Russian Orthodox icon paintings he was raised on.
One early supporter of the “Meditations” was the American composer John Cage. In 1935, age 23 and a gifted but penniless student, he began collecting the portraits with a $1 down payment. In broken German, Cage gushed to the artist, “I’m overjoyed because I have bought one of your pictures. Now it is in me. I write music. You are my teacher.” Two years later, the Nazi Party began confiscating Jawlensky’s work from museums and parading it in their “Degenerate Art” exhibition.
“Jawlensky kept pushing in new directions, like Marsden Hartley or Philip Guston,” adds Seeberg. “And he sort of knew that he succeeded in the end, writing about the ‘Meditations’ in his memoirs: ‘Now I leave these small, but to me, important works to the future, and to people who love art.’”
“Alexej Jawlensky” will be running at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Copenhagen, from January 30 to June 1
Harry Seymour is a London-based art historian and writer
