Self-Portrait I

Around 1910 the salon Marianne von Werefkin ran with Alexej Jawlensky on Giselastraße in Schwabing drew painters, writers, dancers and Russian aristocrats passing through Munich, and contemporaries agreed that she was its centre. The museum director Gustav Pauli described her as a kind of transmitting station for almost physically palpable waves of energy. This self-portrait comes from those years, when she was about 50. She turns her face from three-quarter profile toward us, as if in a sudden movement, and the museum points first to the eyes, the whites painted vermilion, the pupils mere dots, set against steel blue. The warmer red of the mouth comes back in the soft hat that closes over her dark hair like a cap. The blue-green and yellow ground behind her is laid on in brushwork the museum links to van Gogh. She painted it in tempera on paper with touches of metallic bronze, and it came to the Lenbachhaus in the 1960s from the Werefkin foundation in Ascona.