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Lot Essay
During the years between 1907-1910, alongside landscapes and female portrait heads, Alexej von Jawlensky painted a dozen or more still-life compositions. Stilleben stands out among the artist’s tabletop pictures not only for its sonorous, lavishly brushed colour effects; it is also one of few works that depicts within it another painting by the artist. In the background is a characteristic, fully resolved, yet unidentified, Murnau landscape from circa 1910 (M. Jawlensky, L. Pieroni-Jawlensky & A. Jawlensky, op. cit., p. 408).
Executed in the distinguishable Cloisonnism style, with dark contouring carving through saturated colour planes, Stilleben combines both earlier influences of Gauguin and the School of Pont Aven, with those of Jawlensky’s later Fauve counterparts, Matisse and Derain. However, as John Elderfield observes, “The exotic colouring of Jawlensky and of the Murnau Kandinsky sets the German work apart from the French…French colouring resolved itself around the contrast of complementary hues; the German use of colour depended on an orchestration of adjacent hues, set off and enlivened by complementaries, and generally deeper and more resonant in effect...The Fauves...used high colour in a harmonious way; the Brücke group, for the drama it evoked; Kandinsky and his friends, at the service of an inward vision” (exh.cat., “The Wild Beasts”: Fauvism and its Affinites, New York, 1976, p. 143).
The key to Stilleben is not just the rich exotic palette, Elderfield describes, but a display of other specific techniques adopted by the artist and his fellow comrades of the Der Blaue Reiter group during this period. From 1903-1904 Jawlensky began working on light brown board, and by 1905 it became his sole support. From hereon, Jawlensky would purposefully leave compositions with areas of the board still visible, its texture noticeable under paint layers applied in wavy, zig-zag strokes. Stilleben is a triumphant display of how Jawlensky adopted this technique, noticeably so in the purple background and his rendering of the vase and Murnau landscape. With colour and texture being of major importance, Jawlensky successfully manipulates his use of exposed board to create the effect of richly bold flattened areas of pigment that appear to almost hover above their surface. The effect is to at once engage viewer with their subject, in close-up, thus intensifying a palpable, intimate sense of presence to maximise expressive effect.
Executed in the distinguishable Cloisonnism style, with dark contouring carving through saturated colour planes, Stilleben combines both earlier influences of Gauguin and the School of Pont Aven, with those of Jawlensky’s later Fauve counterparts, Matisse and Derain. However, as John Elderfield observes, “The exotic colouring of Jawlensky and of the Murnau Kandinsky sets the German work apart from the French…French colouring resolved itself around the contrast of complementary hues; the German use of colour depended on an orchestration of adjacent hues, set off and enlivened by complementaries, and generally deeper and more resonant in effect...The Fauves...used high colour in a harmonious way; the Brücke group, for the drama it evoked; Kandinsky and his friends, at the service of an inward vision” (exh.cat., “The Wild Beasts”: Fauvism and its Affinites, New York, 1976, p. 143).
The key to Stilleben is not just the rich exotic palette, Elderfield describes, but a display of other specific techniques adopted by the artist and his fellow comrades of the Der Blaue Reiter group during this period. From 1903-1904 Jawlensky began working on light brown board, and by 1905 it became his sole support. From hereon, Jawlensky would purposefully leave compositions with areas of the board still visible, its texture noticeable under paint layers applied in wavy, zig-zag strokes. Stilleben is a triumphant display of how Jawlensky adopted this technique, noticeably so in the purple background and his rendering of the vase and Murnau landscape. With colour and texture being of major importance, Jawlensky successfully manipulates his use of exposed board to create the effect of richly bold flattened areas of pigment that appear to almost hover above their surface. The effect is to at once engage viewer with their subject, in close-up, thus intensifying a palpable, intimate sense of presence to maximise expressive effect.