Night in Saint-Prex

At Saint-Prex, on Lake Geneva, where the war had pushed him in 1914, Jawlensky had one small room to work in and one window. He described what he saw from it: a path, a few trees, and now and then a mountain in the distance. He wanted to go on with the big, blazing pictures of his Munich years and found that he could not. So he shrank his formats to about 30 by 40 centimetres and painted that view again and again, calling the results Variations on a Landscape Theme, or songs without words. His friends from the Blue Rider circle were puzzled by the change at first. The Lenbachhaus counts more than 100 of these variations, some painted as late as 1921, long after he had left the lake. This is a night version, on a board only 36 centimetres high, and it came to the museum as a gift in 1971.