Still life with apples

Jawlensky painted these apples in 1908, the year things sped up for him. That summer he and Wassily Kandinsky, with the painters Marianne von Werefkin and Gabriele Münter, worked side by side in the Bavarian town of Murnau, and the colour in their pictures suddenly went loud — laid on flat and bright, dark outlines around it, the real look of things pushed aside for the feel of them. A plate of apples was as good a thing as any to try it on. He was a Russian ex-officer turned painter, living in Munich, and he still signed the corner in Cyrillic and dated it, in his own hand, '08.