Sommertag, 1907

By 1907 Alexej von Jawlensky, born in Russia and settled in Munich, was working his way through Paul Cezanne, dead barely a year, and through Gauguin's habit of laying color down in flat, deliberate patches. This is a summer day he found near the town of Wasserburg on the river Inn, in Bavaria. It is a warm subject painted cool: blues and violets take over the fields, and even the red of the roofs is chilled down toward purple, so the season reads as quiet, almost melancholy, rather than bright. He was a year from the summer at Murnau where his color would finally blaze. When it first left the studio, in 1914, it traveled to a Baltic exhibition in Malmo, in Sweden; war broke out that summer, and works lent by Russian artists were kept there for safety.