Summer Evening in Murnau

The black lines that hold this little landscape together reached Jawlensky by way of a monk. In 1907 he got to know Willibrord Verkade, a Dutch painter who had once belonged to the Nabis, the circle of young Paris artists around Paul Gauguin, and who had since become a Benedictine at the abbey of Beuron in southern Germany. Verkade often painted in Jawlensky's Munich studio. That same year his friend Paul Sérusier, the painter who had carried Gauguin's ideas back to the Nabis in the first place, came to Munich to visit him and met Jawlensky as well. What the two brought with them was a way of building a picture from flat areas of colour fenced in by dark outlines, and the message that art is above all a means of expression. Here, in Murnau a year or two later, a summer evening is laid in with a few loose patches of hill and field, and only the centre of the picture gets any detail at all. Gabriele Münter, who was painting landscapes very like this one at the time, gave it to the Lenbachhaus in 1960.