Still Life with Fruit

Around 1910 Jawlensky painted a run of still lifes that the Lenbachhaus counts among his best work before the First World War, and this is one of them. They were also very nearly his last. From 1911 the human face moved to the centre of everything he did, and he came back to still life only in his final years. Here apples, a few vessels and the dark blue fingers of stylised flowers stand on a blue-grey surface, and a thin horizontal line divides the table from a deeper blue-green behind. The brushwork is heavy and physical, and you can feel the effort of the arm in it. Jawlensky said of these pictures that he was searching hard, through colour and form, to express what was vibrating inside him, and that the material object was not what he was after. The Lenbachhaus sets this one beside a grey still life by Gabriele Münter, to show how much his still lifes meant to her as a point of reference.