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Lot Essay
Painted in 1921, Abstrakter Kopf: Durchdringendes Licht is an early example of the series of "Abstract Heads" which Jawlensky began a few years after the end of the First World War, and which was to occupy him throughout the 1920s and 1930s. It was in this group of paintings that Jawlensky truly pared back all the superfluous details that had been in his earlier "Mystical Heads" and the "Saviour's Faces" of the preceding years. These simplified, frontal faces are characterized by a consistent compositional design which retains the main structure of the head while translating features such as the closed eyes and thin mouth into geometric planes that surround the central axis, creating a formalized template that allowed him to arrange color systematically in his search for harmony and spirituality.
Jawlensky’s schematic approach to painting was closely related to the linear style of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinky and Lyonel Feininger, who all taught at the Bauhaus in the 1920s. Together with Jawlensky, they formed the Blue Four, an artist’s group tirelessly promoted by Galka Scheyer and which first exhibited together at the Nassauischer Kunstverein in Wiesbaden in 1921, the year the present work was painted.
Discussing his use of the face to undertake his personal examinations of the spiritual, Jawlensky explained that, "I found it necessary to find form for the face, because I had come to understand that great art can only be painted with religious feeling. And that I could only bring to the human face. I understood that the artist must express through his art, in forms and colors, the divine inside him. Therefore a work of art is God made visible, and art is a ˈlonging for God.ˈ I have painted ˈFacesˈ for many years. I sat in my studio and painted, and did not need Nature as a prompter. I only had to immerse myself in myself, pray, and prepare my soul to a state of religious awareness... They are technically very perfect, and radiate spirituality" (letter to Pater Willlibrord Verkade, Wiesbaden, 12 June 1938, quoted in M. Jawlensky, L. Pieroni-Jawlensky and A. Jawlensky, op. cit., 1991, vol. I, p. 34).
Jawlensky’s schematic approach to painting was closely related to the linear style of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinky and Lyonel Feininger, who all taught at the Bauhaus in the 1920s. Together with Jawlensky, they formed the Blue Four, an artist’s group tirelessly promoted by Galka Scheyer and which first exhibited together at the Nassauischer Kunstverein in Wiesbaden in 1921, the year the present work was painted.
Discussing his use of the face to undertake his personal examinations of the spiritual, Jawlensky explained that, "I found it necessary to find form for the face, because I had come to understand that great art can only be painted with religious feeling. And that I could only bring to the human face. I understood that the artist must express through his art, in forms and colors, the divine inside him. Therefore a work of art is God made visible, and art is a ˈlonging for God.ˈ I have painted ˈFacesˈ for many years. I sat in my studio and painted, and did not need Nature as a prompter. I only had to immerse myself in myself, pray, and prepare my soul to a state of religious awareness... They are technically very perfect, and radiate spirituality" (letter to Pater Willlibrord Verkade, Wiesbaden, 12 June 1938, quoted in M. Jawlensky, L. Pieroni-Jawlensky and A. Jawlensky, op. cit., 1991, vol. I, p. 34).