Nikita

Letters that surfaced in Russia date this sitting to Easter 1910, in Munich. The boy is Nikita, born in 1899, a nephew of the painter Marianne von Werefkin, who shared Jawlensky's household. He wears a sailor suit over a blue and white striped telnyashka, the undershirt of the Russian navy, and Jawlensky set the dark figure hard against a turquoise green that looks lit from behind. The picture went into the second exhibition of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München that September. Nikita went home to the career his family had arranged for him. He served as a page at the court of the Tsar, trained as an officer with the Preobrazhensky Guards, and in 1917 he disappeared while carrying dispatches in the Crimea. On the back of the same piece of cardboard Jawlensky had painted a still life with a yellow cloth. In 1966 the support was split through its thickness, and the two pictures have hung apart ever since.