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Lot Essay
Executed in 1909, Kind mit gefalteten Händen dates from the period in which Jawlensky began to find and consolidate his own individualised, artistic language of expression. 'My paintings glowed with colour. I was deeply contented at that time… For the first time in my life I had grasped how to paint not what I saw but what I felt' (Jawlensky, 'Memoir dictated to Lisa Kümmel, Wiesbaden, 1937', quoted in M. Jawlensky, L. Pieroni-Jawlensky & A. Jawlensky, Alexej von Jawlensky: Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, vol. I, 1890-1914, London, 1991, p. 30). A striking and powerfully rendered half-length depiction of Jawlensky's favourite subject, the human form, Kind mit gefalteten Händen expresses a profound timelessness, as well as the spirituality Jawlensky always sought to portray in his explorations of the figure.
The bold colourism of Kind mit gefalteten Händen is most evident in the girl's face and in the intense blues of the background, particularly as Jawlensky contrasts these areas so starkly with the subtle but highly varied colouring of the expanse of her dress, which, punctuated by the elegant sweep of her joined arms, comprises the majority of the composition. Jawlensky's use of green to portray shadow in the girl's head and neck, as well as more sparingly in her arms, was a technique adopted from Henri Matisse, by whose work Jawlensky was deeply impressed, and with whom he had exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905, the infamous exhibition during which a critic branded Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and their colleagues Fauves ('wild beasts'). The zones of expressive colour that Matisse liberated from descriptive function in works such as La Femme au chapeau,1905 (Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco), the scandal of this show, and later in his Portrait de Madame Matisse (La Raie verte), 1905 (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), reappear with a Germanic sensibility in Jawlensky's use of non-naturalistic, complementary colours and heavy, dark outlines. Jawlensky was greatly impressed by the boldness of Matisse's works, and by the intense sense of vitality that his unfettered palette conveyed and, like Matisse, he utilized the forms of the objective world as a structure for colour and an opportunity to explore the essential character of things.
Kind mit gefalteten Händen prefigures, in the breakdown of form and the simplification of descriptive technique in favour of colouristic expression, Jawlensky's later celebrated series of works entitled Heilandsgesicht and Abstrakter Kopf. It is in these pictures that Jawlensky attains a new, abstract use of colour and form that moves far beyond Matisse. However, in not yet displaying the codified similarity of those series paintings, Kind mit gefalteten Händen remains a colourist exploration of an individual, rather than a generalised notion of the human form as abstract subject matter and template for the artist's arrangement and exploration of colour and spiritual harmony. However, Jawlensky can already be seen paring back the subject matter in order to emphasise the figure, removing the brightly-coloured background, as well as any extraneous detail that might anchor the picture in too specific a moment. The background has been rendered in tones that are deliberately dark in order to make the girl and her dress appear to glow upon the canvas, an effect that is heightened by the incandescent reds and yellows that highlight her face.
It was in his paintings of heads from this period that Jawlensky made many of his greatest artistic advances, although he continued to paint landscapes in Murnau during the summer, when he holidayed with his friends Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriel Münter. By contrast to the Murnau landscapes, the heads tended to be studio pictures, executed indoors in Munich during the colder months. Yet this was the subject matter that would soon come to dominate his output, as Jawlensky believed, both spiritually and aesthetically, that, 'the face is not just a face but the whole universe. In the face the whole universe becomes manifest' (Jawlensky, quoted in C. Weiler, Jawlensky: Heads, Faces, Meditations, London, 1971, p. 56).
The bold colourism of Kind mit gefalteten Händen is most evident in the girl's face and in the intense blues of the background, particularly as Jawlensky contrasts these areas so starkly with the subtle but highly varied colouring of the expanse of her dress, which, punctuated by the elegant sweep of her joined arms, comprises the majority of the composition. Jawlensky's use of green to portray shadow in the girl's head and neck, as well as more sparingly in her arms, was a technique adopted from Henri Matisse, by whose work Jawlensky was deeply impressed, and with whom he had exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905, the infamous exhibition during which a critic branded Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck and their colleagues Fauves ('wild beasts'). The zones of expressive colour that Matisse liberated from descriptive function in works such as La Femme au chapeau,1905 (Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco), the scandal of this show, and later in his Portrait de Madame Matisse (La Raie verte), 1905 (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen), reappear with a Germanic sensibility in Jawlensky's use of non-naturalistic, complementary colours and heavy, dark outlines. Jawlensky was greatly impressed by the boldness of Matisse's works, and by the intense sense of vitality that his unfettered palette conveyed and, like Matisse, he utilized the forms of the objective world as a structure for colour and an opportunity to explore the essential character of things.
Kind mit gefalteten Händen prefigures, in the breakdown of form and the simplification of descriptive technique in favour of colouristic expression, Jawlensky's later celebrated series of works entitled Heilandsgesicht and Abstrakter Kopf. It is in these pictures that Jawlensky attains a new, abstract use of colour and form that moves far beyond Matisse. However, in not yet displaying the codified similarity of those series paintings, Kind mit gefalteten Händen remains a colourist exploration of an individual, rather than a generalised notion of the human form as abstract subject matter and template for the artist's arrangement and exploration of colour and spiritual harmony. However, Jawlensky can already be seen paring back the subject matter in order to emphasise the figure, removing the brightly-coloured background, as well as any extraneous detail that might anchor the picture in too specific a moment. The background has been rendered in tones that are deliberately dark in order to make the girl and her dress appear to glow upon the canvas, an effect that is heightened by the incandescent reds and yellows that highlight her face.
It was in his paintings of heads from this period that Jawlensky made many of his greatest artistic advances, although he continued to paint landscapes in Murnau during the summer, when he holidayed with his friends Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriel Münter. By contrast to the Murnau landscapes, the heads tended to be studio pictures, executed indoors in Munich during the colder months. Yet this was the subject matter that would soon come to dominate his output, as Jawlensky believed, both spiritually and aesthetically, that, 'the face is not just a face but the whole universe. In the face the whole universe becomes manifest' (Jawlensky, quoted in C. Weiler, Jawlensky: Heads, Faces, Meditations, London, 1971, p. 56).