Alexej von Jawlensky

Jawlensky's art combined influences from Russian icons and folk art with modernism. He exhibited with the Fauves in 1905 and was a friend of Kandinsky, with whom he shared his spiritual aspirations and his conception of art as the expression of the artist's inner world. In 1914, he began working in series, producing endless variations of the same image--first a landscape, then, and for the rest of his life, the human face. This watercolor belongs to a series begun at the end of the First World War, when Jawlensky was living in exile in Switzerland. At the time, he was interested in Eastern philosophy and religion. His series of faces were inspired by Emmy "Galka" Scheyer, an artist he met in 1916, whose portrait he increasingly stylized until it was reduced to a few geometric patterns. The title of the series of Savior's Faces assimilates these paintings to objects of meditation.