Abstract Head

Jawlensky was a Russian officer turned painter, and the First World War had just uprooted him, driving him out of Germany into exile in Switzerland. There, cramped and short of money, he narrowed his art to a single motif, the human face, repeated hundreds of times. This is one of the Abstract Heads he began around 1918, a head reduced to a grid of lines and flat blocks of colour, the eyes usually closed. He was reading about Indian yogis and holy men, and he still built these faces the way the Orthodox icons of his Russian childhood were built, frontal and symmetrical. He would paint variations on this one head for another 17 years.