Head of a Woman

When the war began in August 1914 Jawlensky was a Russian subject living in Munich, and his household was given 48 hours to leave Germany. They landed at Saint-Prex, a village on Lake Geneva, in quarters so tight that for the next three years he worked mainly on one motif, the view from a single window, painted again and again. In 1917 the revolution at home ended what money still reached him from Russia, and that autumn he moved to Zurich and registered there in October. Around him were other people the war had stranded in neutral Switzerland, among them the sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Hans Arp, who was in the thick of Dada. He wrote later that it was in Zurich that he painted his so-called mystical heads, female faces carried down to the neck and shoulders. This small head is dated to that same year.