Alexej Jawlensky

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk

Though closely associated with the European avant-garde movements at the beginning of the 20th century, the painter Alexej Jawlensky (1864-1941) seems to have found his very own artistic voice rather late in life. This exhibition focuses on Jawlensky’s path towards a highly distinctive expression in the form of his small, beautiful and mysterious meditations devoted almost exclusively to painting the same subject over and over again; a face.


The first chapter of the exhibition in fact focuses on Jawlensky’s connection to the art scene in Munich at the beginning of the 20th century. Together with Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter and Werefkin, he settled for a period in Murnau in Upper Bavaria and developed his highly expressive landscape paintings here.


The exhibition’s second chapter takes its point of departure in Switzerland, where he, as a Russian, was forced to move into exile after the outbreak of the First World War. Here he and Werefkin settled by Lake Geneva, and as he did not have an actual studio, he painted the view from his window over and over again.


The exhibition’s third chapter deals with Jawlensky’s final years in Germany during the 1930s. In the last two decades of his life, it is the repetition of the motif that keeps him preoccupied. Already in Switzerland he began painting faces serially – and these were to become his primary practice and the original contribution to art history.

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