Mystical Head: Meditation

In 1915 a young German painter, Emmy Scheyer, saw Jawlensky's pictures at an exhibition in Lausanne and decided to devote herself to his work. He nicknamed her Galka, Russian for jackdaw, and she championed him for the rest of her life. Her portrait was one of the starting points for the Mystical Heads he developed from 1917, and the Lenbachhaus still finds a trace of her in this one, in the narrow oval of the face and the stylised curls at the temples. Everything else has gone, the hair, the neck, the likeness. A fine scaffold of coloured lines floats on the ochre ground, the lids are lowered, and above the bridge of the nose sit the coloured spots the museum calls a sign of wisdom. In 1938 he wrote to an old friend, the painter-monk Willibrord Verkade, that great art should be painted only with religious feeling, and that he could put that feeling only into the human face.