Portrait of Hedwig Kubin

Early in 1906 the Austrian draughtsman Alfred Kubin and his wife came to see Jawlensky in his Munich flat on Giselastraße, and this portrait of her was most likely painted during that visit. Kubin was making a name in Munich with drawings of demons and nightmares. Two years earlier, after a severe breakdown, he had married Hedwig Gründler, a widow considerably older than himself and the sister of the writer Oscar A. H. Schmitz. She held him steady for the rest of her life, though she was seriously ill herself. Jawlensky caught her face in broad strokes and set a hat on her head. The loose bands of her dress still lean towards late Impressionism, while the green in the shadows of her face already has the free colour of the Fauves in Paris. That May she began moving the household out of Munich to Zwickledt, a small country house in Upper Austria, and Kubin followed in the autumn. They stayed there from then on, and Hedwig died at Zwickledt in 1948, 11 years before her husband.