Lot 8 D α

Monogrammed and dated to 1935 and 1936, the paintings “Meditation” and “Große Meditation” belong to Jawlensky’s last major group of works: the Meditationen. These mark the conclusion of a line of development within his oeuvre that began with his intensely colourful heads and then underwent a progressive chromatic and compositional reduction through the “Mystischen Köpfe” and “Abstrakten Köpfe” from the 1920s. Jawlensky himself saw them as the crowning achievement of his oeuvre and, in their formal concentration, as its quintessence: “My works from the last period have been in very small formats”, he writes, “but the paintings are even more profound and spiritual, spoken exclusively through colour. Because I have sensed that, as a result of my illness, I will no longer be able to paint in the future, I work like a man possessed on these little “Meditationen” of mine” (cited in: “Alexej Jawlensky”, exh. cat. München/Baden-Baden 1983, p. 292).
Both works display the characteristic, strict pictorial structure: a framework of horizontal and vertical bars marking the area around the eyes as well as the nose and mouth. The left and right halves of the face are filled in with parallel strokes of colour. Many of the Meditationen created from 1935 onwards are unusually dark and, like the two works coming up for auction, possess that mysterious profundity which Annegret Hoberg sees as the result of Jawlensky’s experience of faith: “For Jawlensky these heads, in their serial sequence, signify […] far more than formal studies of the abstracted human face. For him the human countenance became a medium for the experience of transcendence – the repeatedly varied transformation of the previously discovered fundamental form in his painting, ‘a path to God’” (in: Helmut Friedel/Annegret Hoberg, Der Blaue Reiter im Lenbachhaus München, Munich 2004, no. 87). Like no other group of works by Jawlensky, the “Meditationen” testify to his tremendous will in “writing down” his paintings in spite of the increasingly painful stiffening of his joints.