Works by Alexej von Jawlensky

Alexej von Jawlensky, a Russian painter who worked in Germany, was building heads from strong flat colour inside dark outlines by about 1912, and by about 1919 he was paring faces down to a few lines and patches.

A visit to the All-Russia Exhibition of 1882 in Moscow drew him to painting after military training, and from 1889 he studied at the Saint Petersburg academy while still serving. Through Ilya Repin's circle he met Marianne von Werefkin, who set her own work aside to push his, and in the mid-1890s they moved to Munich. Still Life with Bottles and Fruit, of 1900, is laid in with short, separate strokes on a ground of blue dabs.

From 1908 to 1910 he and Werefkin spent their summers in the Bavarian mountains with Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, painting landscapes and trying out one another's methods. In Murnau, of 1910, a dark blue mountain under pink clouds looms over yellow-green fields and red and orange roofs. After seeing Henri Matisse again in 1911 and Emil Nolde the next year, he let colour and form carry his portraits more and more. His Self-portrait of 1912 is a patchwork of red, yellow, pink and turquoise inside thick blue-black lines.

Expelled from Germany when war came in 1914, he went to Switzerland, and after a pause from the human figure he painted the Mystical Heads (1917–19) and the Saviour's Faces (1918–20), which recall the Russian icons of his childhood. In Saviour's Face: Death II, of about 1919, the eyes are closed arcs and two straight lines make the nose. More than half of the paintings below are portraits, and most date from the 1910s.

Sources: Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Museum Wiesbaden, Pomeranian State Museum, Germanisches Nationalmuseum.