Lot 71 Dα

In 1913, the year our “Kopf” was created, Jawlensky’s stylistic development had advanced to the point that he was leaving out everything superfluous or decorative in order to express solely the essential by means of clear forms and contrasting colours. In his memoirs he says of this period in his oeuvre: “This was a turning point in my art. And until 1914, just before the war, I painted my strongest works in these years […]” (cited in: Angelica Jawlensky, Der Weg zur Abstraktion, in: exh. cat. Locarno 1989, p. 100). Jawlensky was evidently aware of the significance of his heads from this period. Our female “Kopf” contains all the characteristic features of these years: the forms of the narrow face and the upper body are held together through broad, black contour lines, and the colours red, green and a black leaning towards blue reciprocally intensify one another. While the oversized eyes with their black pupils gaze at nothing, they magically draw our own eyes under their spell. Here, however – in contrast to the later, even more abstracted heads – Jawlensky has still made an effort to develop details of three-dimensional form, such as creating the shadows on the throat and around the eyes.
From the very beginning and in spite of all his affinity to the painting of the “Blaue Reiter”, Kandinsky’s art is characterised by a highly individual idea of representation. Although he had been trained in accordance with a realism derived, at times, from the 19th-century Russian painter Ilya Repin, he was never interested in the details or narrative of a theme but always instead in the fundamental aspect of the depicted object or person. In this sense, much like his friends and fellow painters Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky, he also pursued only a few visual themes: landscape, still life and, above all, the human image.