Birth Year : 1864
Death Year : 1941
Country : Russian Federation
Alexei von Jawlensky was born in Kuslovso, Russia. In keeping with family
tradition, he entered the Moscow military academy at the age of eighteen.
During this time, however, he also dabbled at painting and attended the
St. Petersburg Academy of Art. While on vacations, he often visited the
estate of a young painter, Marianne von Werefkin, with whom he emigrated
to Munich in 1986. In Munich he enrolled in the Art Academy, of which Kandinsky
was the director. Jawlensky's studio as well as the salon that von Werefkin
would come to hold, soon became gathering places for young artists with
new ideas.
Jawlensky's meeting with Kandinsky was to have a profound effect on
the young painter's artistic sensibilities. He was also very taken with
the work of van Gogh, Cezanne
and, most importantly, Matisse, whom he
discovered during his travels in France. Jawlensky incorporated Matisse
's powerful use of pure color in his landscapes, still lives and portraits.
In 1912 he joined the Blaue Reiter, but when World War I broke out, he
was forced to leave Germany, and for several years he lived in Switzerland,
painting modest landscape scenes from his studio.
It was while he was in Switzerland that Jawlensky developed the form
of art that was to bring him ultimate fulfillment. With fervent color he
painted landscapes and large heads. The repetition of these themes took
on an increasingly symbolic and meditative quality. In the final version
of his style-dating from around 1917 until his death-he painted only heads:
the human face as a simple geometrical design, an object of religious mediation
reduced to a figure as simple as the cross. Jawlensky made of his art a
modern religious icon, drawn from the piety of his Russian Orthodoxy. In
1921 Jawl
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Alexej
von Jawlensky
An
der Ostsee
Alexej
von Jawlensky
Woman
with a Fan
Blue
Vase, The
Alexej
von Jawlensky
Das
Gebet
Alexej
von Jawlensky
Dornenekrone,1918
Books about Alexej von Jawlensky |
