Maturity

In the summer of 1911 Jawlensky worked at Prerow, a village on the Baltic coast, and he later counted that summer as a great step forward in his art. He even listed the colours he used there, a lot of red, then blue, orange, cadmium yellow and chromium oxide green, with the forms outlined hard in Prussian blue. This head, which the Lenbachhaus dates to around 1912, comes straight out of that. Its title, Maturity, names no sitter, and the museum hears in it the summer glow of the colours themselves. The face looks out head-on from wide green eyes rimmed in black. The museum calls the colours wilder than those of the Fauves, the Paris painters known for raw colour, and a firm black scaffold of lines holds them in place. The almost square board cuts the figure off just below the neck, so nothing competes with the round of the head and those green eyes.