The Humpback I

1911 was a loud year in Munich for the Russian painter Alexej von Jawlensky. The artists' group he had helped found two years earlier was breaking apart, and out of that quarrel Kandinsky and Franz Marc would soon launch the Blue Rider. The same year Jawlensky saw Matisse again in France, and afterwards his colour grew bolder and freer, laid on in thick, plain strokes. His steady subject in these years was a single human face seen close, painted with the frontal calm he took from the Russian icons of his childhood. Here that same attention falls on a hunchbacked figure, the title naming the body without softening it.