Lot 249 Dα

Alongside his renowned “Abstract Heads” and the “Meditations” that followed from them, with his flower still lifes Alexej von Jawlensky began the final major phase is his oeuvre. While prior to 1934 they tend to crop up only sporadically in his output, in the second half of the 1930s the artist accorded them more or less the same status as his other works. Similar to his “Variations”, which he produced during World War I, and which took as their starting point the view from one and the same window in his house in St. Prex, for his floral still lifes Jawlensky chose as his theme the flower vases standing on the window sill of his studio. Bordering on an abstract composition, he varied the basic formal pattern in these small-sized still lifes of flowers over and over again - taken together they intimate the notion of a serial principle.
Our fine still life with blooming azaleas in a pink vase stands out for the bright triad of red, blue and green tones. Characteristic for these works is the reduction of the theme to simple shapes, and the use of typical vertical brushstrokes. In the floral still lifes Jawlensky sets out, as he wrote in a letter of 1937 to Galka Scheyer, to reproduce what he saw and also what his soul discerned (see M. Jawlensky, Pieroni-Jawlensky, & A. Jawlensky, Alexej von Jawlensky. Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, vol. 3, 1934 - 1937, p. 13).