Self-portrait

Jawlensky painted himself in oil only about ten times across a life that produced thousands of pictures, and this one, done in Munich in 1912, is the last of them made before the First World War. He was 48. He built the head like masonry, red shoulders for a base, the collar as a pedestal, the face set square on top, the eyes ringed in dark so heavily they read almost as a mask. The comparison usually drawn is with Japanese woodblock portraits of kabuki actors, which European painters had been collecting for decades, and the flat yellows, reds and blues are close to them. What he left out is everything those prints carry around the face, the costume and the swords and the props, so the character has to come out of the colour alone. Museum Wiesbaden holds two pencil drawings for it, where the head is already framed in exactly this way and he is looking the other direction.