Medusa

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Jawlensky was a Russian living in Munich, and almost overnight he became an enemy alien. He crossed into Switzerland and spent the war years in a small rented house near Geneva, cut off from the German art world he had helped build. In that isolation he stopped painting the outside world and turned to the human face, over and over, in a long series he sometimes called heads of saints. Medusa comes near the end of that run, in 1923. The face fills almost the whole panel, the eyes ringed in heavy black like the icons he had grown up with in Orthodox Russia. Lyon bought it in 1936.