Alexej Jawlensky - SKETCHLINE

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1864 - 1941

Alexej Jawlensky

description

A Russian painter, who worked in Germany and Switzerland.

Alexej was the fifth of eight children born into the family of a colonel in the Russian army. In the 1980s, he served as an officer in the imperial army. At the same time, he was a student of Ilya Repin, working in his workshop at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts.

He was a founding member of the association of Munich Expressionist artists “New Art Society” (Neue Künster Vereinigung), the group “Blue Horseman” (“Der Blaue Reiter”); starting in 1925, he was a member of the Blue Four (“Die Blauen Vier”) – an association that actively collaborated with German and American art galleries and art dealers.

Key ideas:

– As the most consistent of the Russian-German Expressionist artists, Alexej Jawlensky developed and embodied the ideas of coloristic Symbolism, achieving expressiveness in color-based decisions and a deep emotionality in the structure of his paintings. He preserved this style into the later period, when the artist introduced the methods and techniques of Abstract art into his works.

– The artist explained his pre-war work: “I painted landscapes and large figures in strong, bright colors, not at all naturalistic, not objective. I used a large amount of red, blue, orange, cadmium yellow, green. Forms were very much outlined – they came with tremendous force from inner ecstasy.”

– After a period of fascination with landscape painting, Jawlensky returned to experiments with the human form, conceiving and achieving, perhaps, his most famous series of paintings with the general name “Mystical (Abstract) Heads”, as well as his “Faces of the Savior” series (1918-1920), which, according to art historians, are very reminiscent of traditional Russian Orthodox icons, familiar to the author from his childhood.

– The artist himself said: “Every artist works within the framework of tradition. I am native to Russia. My Russian soul has always been close to Russian icons, to Byzantine art, to mosaics in Ravenna and Venice, to Romanesque art. All these works produce a religious vibration in my soul, because I sense a deep spiritual language in them.”

Alexej Jawlensky

On Artist

flow

Simbolism

Post-Impressionism

Fauvism

friends

Wassily Kandinsky

Franz Marc

Paul Klee

artists

Vincent van Gogh

Ferdinand Hodler

Paul Serusier

Emil Nolde

Henri Matisse

Ilya Repin

Anton Azhbe

By Artist

flow

Expressionism

friends

Wassily Kandinsky

Franz Marc

Paul Klee

Marianna Verevkina

Dmitry Kardovsky

Igor Grabar

Adolf Erbsloh

Gabriela Munter

Feininger Lionel

description

Location: Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland.

1913

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Location: Belvedere Gallery, Vienna, Austria.

1912

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Mediums: oil, paper. Location: Omsk Museum of Fine Arts, Russia.

1909

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Mediums: oil, canvas. Location: Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland.

1908

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Mediums: oil, canvas. Location: Gallery in Lenbachhauz, Munich, Germany.

1905