Love

In the mid-1920s Jawlensky drew close again to old colleagues from his Munich years. Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Lyonel Feininger were teaching at the Bauhaus, the new art school in Weimar, and in 1924 the four joined together as the Blue Four, a practical alliance for exhibiting and selling their work, above all in America. Love, painted the following year, has a geometric hardness that the Lenbachhaus sets beside the experiments of those years. The museum counts it among the principal works of his constructive heads of the 1920s and points to strict horizontals and verticals, circles and segments of circles, and paint laid on so evenly that no irregularity is left. It adds that the contact changed nothing essential in his aims. For Jawlensky the perfected form of the head remained a way towards personal religious revelation. It is large for one of his heads, almost 60 centimetres tall, and in the lower right corner he dated it X.25, October 1925.