Helene in Spanish Costume

Helene Nesnakomoff worked in the household of the painter Marianne von Werefkin, who shared a flat and studios with Jawlensky on Giselastraße in Munich. He painted her there life-size, on a canvas 190 centimetres high, the largest picture he ever made. She stands with her hands on her hips and meets you at eye level, in a red skirt and a green bodice, and the colour is built from red and yellow with blue left out altogether. When it was finished is still an open question. The catalogue of his oil paintings dates it to about 1901, an argument that rests partly on reading Helene as pregnant with Andreas, her son by Jawlensky, born in January 1902. Against that, Jawlensky remembered the canvas standing wet on the easel when the painter Lovis Corinth turned up unannounced and told him to send something to the Berlin Secession, and Werefkin's diary puts that visit on 22 February 1904.