A colourful past

By the time the Expressionist painter Alexej von Jawlensky arrived in Carantec in the summer of 1905, “wild and primitive” Brittany – as Paul Gauguin had called it almost 20 years earlier – was already established as a place to which artists travelled in search of stimulus.

“I was painting mostly still lifes,” he recalls in his memoir of 1937, “because in them I could more easily find myself [and] express in colour and form the thing that was vibrating within me, and I achieved some good results.”

As is evident from this painting of a Breton woman, Bretonin, which Bonhams is offering in its Impressionist and Modern Art sale in April, he found inspiration in the light and the colours of its landscape. (He also painted houses, haystacks, cornfields and the sea, most strikingly in The Coast near Carantec in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.) But he painted people too: “Breton heads from my window”. It is his increasingly stylised heads for which he is best remembered.

If his time in Paris introduced him to the work of Gauguin, Cézanne and Van Gogh, the summers he spent in Brittany, Normandy and Provence opened his eyes to the synaesthetic potential of colour and taught him to paint what he felt, not what he saw. Colours, he said “resound in my sight like a music, reproducing this or that mood in my soul”. The cap of the Bretonin may at first glance strike the viewer as black, but he paints it in a multiplicity of vibrant reds and blues. And he signals her maturity by giving her a complexion that is at once yellow (those greens) and flushed (those reds and oranges). Her piercing emerald eyes may sparkle still, but they are ringed in pinks and blues. “I used a great deal of red, blue, orange, cadmium yellow and chromium-oxide green,” he said. “My forms were very strongly contoured in Prussian blue and came with tremendous power from an inner ecstasy. … I understood how to transfer nature into colours appropriate to the fire in my soul. The pictures were glowing with colour. And my inner self was contented.”

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Born in 1864 in the ancient Russian city of Torzhok, the son of a colonel, Jawlensky was a promising cadet in the Imperial Guard when he visited the All-Russia Exhibition of Industry and Art in Moscow in 1882. He was transfixed by the paintings. “I was touched by grace,” he wrote, “like the Apostle Paul at the moment of his conversion. My life was totally transformed. And since that day art has been my only passion…”.

There was no question of changing career, but in 1889 – by now an officer, still unable to resign his commission – he enrolled at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. At least until his discharge, he combined both callings.

Among his teachers was the great realist painter Ilya Repin. It was through him that Jawlensky, then 28, met the artist Marianne von Werefkin, 32, who was studying privately with Repin because the Academy did not admit women. Highly educated, fluent in half a dozen languages, a keen subscriber to European art magazines and so talented that Repin compared her work to Velázquez and Rembrandt, she was the daughter of a general – and she and Jawlensky soon became friends. He would attend the salons she held at the Peter and Paul Fortress, where her father was commandant, and for three years they shared a studio. In 1896, on the death of her father, she inherited a generous pension of 7,000 roubles a year, contingent on her remaining unmarried. She and Jawlensky left Petersburg for Munich, whereupon she gave up painting for a decade in order to mentor and support him, not least by establishing another influential salon in their elegant home on Giselastrasse in then bohemian Schwabing.

Theirs was an unconventional relationship. As she wrote (in French) in her epistolary autobiography Lettres à un inconnu: Aux sources de l’expressionisme (1901, but published posthumously), “For four years we have slept together. But I remain a virgin, and he has become a virgin again. Between us sleeps our child – art. It is the child who ensures our undisturbed sleep. Carnal desire has never once befouled our bed. We both want to remain unsullied, so that not a single impure thought could ever disturb the calm of our nights when we are so close to each other. And yet we love each other. Since we exchanged declarations of love many years ago, we have not kissed once even for form’s sake. He is everything for me, I love him as a mother, especially as a mother, as a friend, a sister, a wife, I love him as an artist and a friend. He loves in me his art, and without me he’d die – but he has never enjoyed me as a woman.”

The biographer and translator Rosamund Bartlett attributes this to her “apparent revulsion towards sex”. Jawlensky was not so chaste. In January 1902, his son Andreas was born to Werekfin’s teenage maid, Elena Neznakomova, later Hélène Nesnakomoff. The child was passed off as his nephew; Nesnakomoff kept her job; and Jawlensky’s relationship with Werefkin endured for another 18 years.

Thereafter, she and Jawlensky began to travel, first to Venice and then in subsequent years to France. There, thanks to a meeting with the impresario and fellow Russian Sergei Diaghilev, Jawlensky exhibited in the 1905 Salon d’Automne, the show at which works by Les Fauves (‘wild beasts’) were first hung together. Matisse’s use of vivid, often unnaturalistic colours and distorted forms made a particularly great impression on Jawlensky.

By 1908, he and Werefkin were settled back in Munich, and she was painting again in an increasingly Expressionist style. That year their neighbours, Wassily Kandinsky – another Russian émigré – and his student turned partner Gabriele Münter, invited them to spend the summer at Murnau in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. There the four of them set up the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (New Association of Artists Munich), a precursor to Der Blaue Reiter, which Kandinsky went on to form with Franz Marc, and with which Jawlensky and Werefkin exhibited, though never formally members.

It disbanded at the start of World War I, at which point Kandinsky returned to Russia, and Jawlensky and Werefkin fled to Zurich, where they fell in with the Dadaists, and later to Lugano and Ascona in Italy. As the war raged, so her Imperial Army pension dwindled, until the Russian Revolution put a stop to it completely, and she was forced to find work as a stage manager. In 1920, Jawlensky left her, followed by Nesnakomoff and their now grown-up son Andreas, who went on to become an artist himself. Two years later, Jawlensky and Nesnakomoff were married in Wiesbaden, where they lived until his death in 1941.

Perhaps inevitably he made dozens of paintings of her, the earliest in 1894 when she was still a child who had just come to work for Werefkin’s family in Russia. The best known are probably Hélène with a Colored Turban (1910) in the Guggenheim in New York and Hélène in a Spanish Costume (1904), now in the collection of the Museum Wiesbaden, not far from the Russian Orthodox church where he and Hélène are buried. Though his catalogue raisonné lists more than 150 female nudes among the 2,000 or so works it records, she always appeared clothed. (She did, however, serve as a life model for Werefkin, notably in two gouache, pencil and ink drawings, in which she wears only stockings and a hat.)

Jawlensky continued to work prolifically after their wedding, and in 1924 joined Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger to form Die Blaue Vier (‘the Blue Four’). The group exhibited widely for the next decade, not least in the US, until crippling arthritis stopped him painting.

If Jawlensky died a model of bourgeois respectability, his was a life somewhat at odds with all that has been written about his piety. (The Encyclopaedia Britannica calls him “devout”.) There is no doubt that his portraits and heads, especially the later ones, were influenced by Russian icons, with their elongated forms and delineated features, their mystical intensity, even in their use of green, the colour used in Eastern Orthodox iconography to denote renewal, eternity and the force of life. “For me the face is not just a face but the whole universe,” he said. “In the face, the whole universe is revealed.” But his devotion was to art not God. He may have painted with what he called “religious feeling”; he may have regarded the human face as possessed of a divine spirit; but art, he said, was “no longer life distilled, but life itself: wounded, passionate, confused, self-contradictory.” Art, he believed, was “nostalgia for God”.

Claire Wrathall writes for the Financial Times.