The Hunchback

In the autumn of 1905 the Salon d'Automne in Paris hung a room of colour so raw that a critic called the painters in it wild beasts, fauves. Jawlensky, a Russian working in Munich, showed there too, and he had spent that year in Brittany painting the people of the coast. This head comes out of that work. A young man in a blue pullover, turned slightly aside, his face built up in short thick strokes of orange and yellow against the blue, the background hatched over with the same broad marks. The title is the one the picture carries in the collection, and it describes something the painting does not show. No bent back is visible here. The word comes from outside the canvas, from accounts of the sitter as a sailor Jawlensky met on that coast. The date is unsettled as well, the museum placing the picture in the Brittany year of 1905 and the catalogue literature a year later. The Lenbachhaus bought it in 1963, paying with money the painter Gabriele Münter had left to the museum.