Spanish Woman

In 1913 alone Jawlensky painted five heads he called Spanish Woman, and on the back of this one he wrote Spanierin N. 2. The same year produced a Byzantine woman, a Creole and a Sicilian. The names describe types of women, and the Lenbachhaus reads the whole run as his attempt to move from one particular face towards a general one. Here a brownish face sits slightly off the central axis of a tall board, with roses in the hair and at the collar, and a veil falls steeply around it in black patterns. Who sat for it is uncertain. Elisabeth Erdmann-Macke, the widow of the painter August Macke, remembered that the dancer Alexander Sacharoff modelled for the Spanish women, but the faces are too stylised for anyone to confirm it. The picture passed through the Galerie Beyeler in Basel and a dealer in Stuttgart before the museum bought it in 1959.