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Lot Essay
At the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Jawlensky, a Russian national, was forced to leave Germany with only 48 hours’ notice, and he moved his family to Saint-Prex, a small Swiss town on Lake Geneva. Over the next few years he worked on his Variations series, experimenting with the quasi-abstract, coloristic rendering of nature, and portraits of girls’ heads. The latter became the basis of a new series of paintings which he called the Mysticher Kopf, or Mystical heads, begun after moving to Zurich in the late spring of 1917 and later continued in Asema. In the previous year Jawlensky had met Emmy Scheyer, a young art student who was so enthralled by his paintings that she gave up her own career to promote his work. Many of the Mysticher Kopf have Emmy's features—large almond-shaped eyes, a long straight nose and bangs. Jawlensky nicknamed her “Galka” (a jackdaw, or small bird from the crow family, in German) because of her jet-black hair. In 1924 she organized a tour in the United States of the works of Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger under the name The Blue Four, and thereafter lived in California as their chief American dealer.
Mystischer Kopf: Damenbildnis I belongs to the Mystischer Kopf series painted between 1917 and 1919. These are relatively few in number compared to some of the artist’s other serial compositions. Jawlensky's Mystischer Kopf series grew from a combination of influences, as did the other “Head” and “Face” series which would come to dominate his output for much of the rest of his life. Due to the war, Jawlensky had seen little art for some time, but in Zurich he was able to enjoy exhibitions dedicated to Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne. This, and the exciting social network of artists and thinkers that he found in Zurich, gave him a new momentum in his painting. Jawlensky thus brought the meditative painting-process that had become such a central ritual to the painting of the Variations to the subject of the human face, one that had long held a fascination for him, in part influenced by the precedent of Russian Orthodox icons. As Jawlensky explained when discussing the genesis of these pictures: “It became necessary for me to find a form for the face, for I realized that great art was only to be painted with religious feeling. And that was something I could bring only to the human face” (quoted in C. Weiler, Jawlensky, Heads, Faces, Meditations, London, 1971, p. 30).
Mystischer Kopf: Damenbildnis I belongs to the Mystischer Kopf series painted between 1917 and 1919. These are relatively few in number compared to some of the artist’s other serial compositions. Jawlensky's Mystischer Kopf series grew from a combination of influences, as did the other “Head” and “Face” series which would come to dominate his output for much of the rest of his life. Due to the war, Jawlensky had seen little art for some time, but in Zurich he was able to enjoy exhibitions dedicated to Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Cézanne. This, and the exciting social network of artists and thinkers that he found in Zurich, gave him a new momentum in his painting. Jawlensky thus brought the meditative painting-process that had become such a central ritual to the painting of the Variations to the subject of the human face, one that had long held a fascination for him, in part influenced by the precedent of Russian Orthodox icons. As Jawlensky explained when discussing the genesis of these pictures: “It became necessary for me to find a form for the face, for I realized that great art was only to be painted with religious feeling. And that was something I could bring only to the human face” (quoted in C. Weiler, Jawlensky, Heads, Faces, Meditations, London, 1971, p. 30).