Portrait of Alexander Sakharoff

Jawlensky had a habit of going back into his pictures again and again, and this one got away from him. The story comes from the dancer Clotilde von Derp, who later married the sitter and became his stage partner. One evening in 1909 the young Russian-born dancer Alexander Sacharoff, then a close friend of Jawlensky's in Munich, called at the studio on his way to perform, already in make-up and costume. Jawlensky painted him on the spot in less than half an hour, and Sacharoff carried the board off while it was still wet, afraid the painter would otherwise keep working on it. That year alone he sat for Jawlensky three times. Here he looks straight out from eyes rimmed in black, the mouth smiling, the dress a signal red. The Lenbachhaus sees this as the first appearance of the frontal, symmetrical face with wide-open eyes that Jawlensky's heads kept returning to until the First World War, and the museum bought the picture in 1965.