Lady in front of a blue background

In the summer of 1908 Jawlensky and his companion, the painter Marianne von Werefkin, took rooms at an inn in Murnau, in the Bavarian foothills, where Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter joined them. The Lenbachhaus in Munich sees that shared stay as the moment Jawlensky broke through to a freer way of painting, flat and simplified, in glowing colours that drift away from what the eye sees. This woman, painted on cardboard the same year, shows the change. Her face is built from patches of orange, pink and green held by heavy black lines, under a wide black hat. A block of red fills a lower corner, and the blue of the title shows only near the top. The Austrian Gallery in Vienna bought the unsigned picture in 1946 from Friedrich and Gertrud Kraissl, while the city was still occupied by the four Allied powers.