Lady with fan

In January 1909 a group of painters in Munich signed the statutes of a new artists' association, Jawlensky among them with Kandinsky, Marianne von Werefkin and Gabriele Münter. By December they had their first exhibition hanging in a Munich gallery, and this head was painted in the same year. Who is sitting there has never been settled. The dancer Alexander Sacharoff, a member of the same association who posed for Jawlensky that year in women's dress, has been proposed, as has a model remembered only as Resi, as has Werefkin. A curator in Wiesbaden argued in 2014 that the picture shows no particular person at all. What the painter was assembling is a type, put together from the almond eyes, the small mouth and the fan of the Japanese prints then being collected all over Munich. The colour does the rest, a hard orange-red ground that drives the violet of the mouth. It is oil on cardboard, the support he worked on again and again in those years, and the museum in Wiesbaden bought it in 1956.