Still Life

In the summer of 1914 the war closed Germany to Russian citizens, and Jawlensky, who had painted in Munich for almost 20 years, was ordered out within days. He settled in a rented room at Saint-Prex, a village on Lake Geneva, with no studio and only a table to work on. This still life comes out of that cramped first year of exile. Cut off from his old materials, he had given up canvas for cheap paper. The picture is oil and pencil on a sheet of linen-textured paper laid on cardboard, only about half a metre across. The objects are plain, a bottle and a few things crowded close on a tabletop, and the colour is pulled down and sober, far from the blazing faces he had been making before the move. That same year, in the same room, he began painting the view from his window again and again, the small works he called Variations and kept at until 1917. This still life is the same size and made the same way, everything within reach of a man sitting at a table.