Alexej von Jawlensky

Alexej von Jawlensky came to painting from the Russian army. Born in 1864, he was a serving officer when he decided to become an artist, and in 1896 he moved to Munich with the painter Marianne von Werefkin, his companion and champion for years, to study at the private painting school of Anton Ažbe, where he soon met a fellow student, Wassily Kandinsky.

In Munich he burned toward pure colour, and by the 1900s he was painting faces and figures in flat, blazing reds, greens and blues close to the German Expressionists. He showed with the Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider circle around Kandinsky that helped launch abstract art. The First World War drove him to neutral Switzerland, and there his art turned inward. He began painting heads, over and over, reduced to a few lines for eyes, nose and mouth, half portrait and half Russian icon.

By 1929 arthritis was crippling his hands. Rather than stop, he strapped the brush to his fingers and kept going, painting hundreds of small, dark, almost abstract heads he called Meditations, until his body forced him to quit in 1937. He died a few years later, his work by then banned as degenerate by the Nazis.