Jawlensky, Alexej von
Alexej von Jawlensky was born on his family estate, 200 miles north-west from Moscow, in the Tver province of the Russian Empire in 1865 where he lived till he was 10 years old. In 1874 Alexej enrolled into military cadet school in Moscow while developing his interest in art after visiting the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition and seeing paintings there in 1882. He started to take drawing classes and frequently visited the then private Tretyakov Gallery.
Jawlnesky followed into the Moscow military college in 1885 and rented a room in the Botkin house, one of the richest families in Russia, where he saw French and Western European art for the first time. After graduating in 1887 he continued to copy paintings in the Tretyakov Gallery and aimed to be transferred to St Petersburg in order to be closer to the Academy of Art.
Jawlnesky succeeded in his endeavours to become an officer at Kronstadt naval base near St Petersburg in 1889 and almost immediately enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts as an external student. His talent was noticed and he started to attend classes of Ilya Repin (1844-1930) in 1891. Repin invited Alexej to his Wednesday evening artists’ meetings where he met a number of the most prominent Russian painters like Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898), Konstantin Korovin (1861-1939) and Valentin Serov (1865-1911) who became his life-long friend. He worked at the studio of Marianne von Werefkin (1860-1938), Repin’s pupil, who became his wife later. Jawlensky retired from his military service and moved to Munich with von Werefkin in 1896. He attended the art school of Anton Ažbe (1962-1905) together with Igor Grabar (1871-1960) and Dmitry Kardovsky (1866-1943) and initially followed the realist art tradition with rich colour palette influenced by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890). Jawlensky met and became friend with Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) in Munich the same year. His works were exhibited at the Berlin and Munich Secession shows from 1903 and at several prominent shows like Knave of Diamonds in Saint Petersburg from 1905. When Jawlensky saw the works of Henri Matisse (1869-1960) and other Fauvists in 1907 it developed his unique form of expressing colours and led to him to became the founding member of Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKMV) or Munich New Association of Artists together with Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter (1877-1962) and Werefkin among the others in 1909. He participated in both exhibitions of this group at the Modern Gallery (Moderne Galerie) of Heinrich Thannhauser (1859–1935) in 1909 and 1910. After rejecting NKMV principles the same group of artists including Alexej von Jawlensky together with Franz Marc (1880-1916), August Macke (1877-1914) and Paul Klee (1879-1940) formed Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group, a second principal German Expressionist art movement after Die Brücke (The Bridge), in 1911. Alexej took part in both exhibitions of this group in Munich in 1911 and 1912, in the Sonderbund show in Cologne in 1912 and the Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm gallery show in Berlin in 1913. At the beginning of the First World War Jawlensky was expelled from Germany and arrived in Switzerland in 1914. He worked on his famous landscapes as well as Mystical Heads and the Faces of the Saviour series and had a large retrospective of his works in Basel in 1917. Alexej moved back to Germany and settled in Wiesbaden in 1921 where he formed the Blue Four art group together with Kandinsky, Klee and Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956). The group had numerous shows in Germany and, tirelessly promoted by Galka Scheyer (1889-1945), almost 20 highly successful exhibitions in the USA from 1925 till 1941. Although his art was labelled “degenerative” and he was banned to have shows from 1933 Jawlensky created over one thousand Meditation works till 1937 which he considered to be the highest achievement of his career. Alexej von Jawlensky works are present in the most important and prestigious international fine art museums and public collections.
