Seated Female Nude

Jawlensky painted very few nudes, and this seated woman from around 1910 is one of that small group. In those same years his great model was Henri Matisse. The Lenbachhaus reads his still lifes of 1910 and 1911 as an open declaration of the French painter's influence. The two had first met in Paris in 1905, and during a longer stay there in 1907 Jawlensky kept going back to Matisse's studio, at the time a meeting place for young painters from all over Europe. Here the face is barely sketched in, and all the attention goes to the curves of the body, set into a tall, narrow sheet of cardboard about 70 centimetres high. He signed it in the upper left corner, and the museum bought it in 1958.