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Lot Essay
Painted circa 1909, Landschaft mit Brücke emerged during one of the most intensively creative and boldly experimental periods of Jawlensky’s artistic career, as he reached a high point in his endeavors to express his visions of the external world through a unique, inner subjective spirit. Jawlensky made a crucial breakthrough in his painting, while sojourning in the small, sleepy Bavarian market town of Murnau alongside his close friends Wassily Kandinsky, Marianne von Werefkin and Gabriele Münter. Here, the four artists spent their days working in a communal manner, painting en plein air to fully immerse themselves in the dramatic Alpine landscapes that surrounded the town, often rendering the same view from slightly different angles and experimenting with each other’s techniques. Their excursions were underpinned by stimulating theoretical discussions into the nature of painting, in which they exchanged ideas regarding not only the technical aspects of their art, but also the spiritual power of their subject matter. In this highly creative atmosphere, Jawlensky took the lead in guiding the group’s artistic evolution, sharing his extensive knowledge of the French avant-garde with his comrades and influencing them with his own ground-breaking views on the expressive potential of color.
For Jawlensky, French art had been an important influence on his painting for a number of years–he had experienced an epiphany during a pivotal visit to Paris in the autumn of 1905, where he first encountered the vibrantly pigmented canvases and expressive brushwork of Henri Matisse and the Fauves. The paintings of Matisse, André Derain, Maurice deVlaminck and their fellow Fauves opened Jawlensky’s eyes to a form of art which was no longer tied to the visible world, in which color could become a powerful force for personal expression. As he explained, it was during this trip that he came to understand "how to translate nature into color according to the fire in my soul…" (Jawlensky, "Memoir dictated to Lisa Kümmel, Wiesbaden, 1937," reproduced in M. Jawlensky, L. Pieroni-Jawlensky and A. Jawlensky, op. cit. p. 30). It was this aspect of Jawlensky’s teachings which had such a lasting impact on his compatriots in Murnau, encouraging Kandinsky and Münter to liberate themselves from the constraints of the perceptible world, and reach for a form of artistic expression that could render visible a sense of the spiritual truths of the universe.
For Jawlensky, French art had been an important influence on his painting for a number of years–he had experienced an epiphany during a pivotal visit to Paris in the autumn of 1905, where he first encountered the vibrantly pigmented canvases and expressive brushwork of Henri Matisse and the Fauves. The paintings of Matisse, André Derain, Maurice deVlaminck and their fellow Fauves opened Jawlensky’s eyes to a form of art which was no longer tied to the visible world, in which color could become a powerful force for personal expression. As he explained, it was during this trip that he came to understand "how to translate nature into color according to the fire in my soul…" (Jawlensky, "Memoir dictated to Lisa Kümmel, Wiesbaden, 1937," reproduced in M. Jawlensky, L. Pieroni-Jawlensky and A. Jawlensky, op. cit. p. 30). It was this aspect of Jawlensky’s teachings which had such a lasting impact on his compatriots in Murnau, encouraging Kandinsky and Münter to liberate themselves from the constraints of the perceptible world, and reach for a form of artistic expression that could render visible a sense of the spiritual truths of the universe.