Tête de femme

The year is 1912, and in Munich a circle of painters calling themselves Der Blaue Reiter, the Blue Rider, has just formed around Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Alexej von Jawlensky, a Russian former army officer who had come west to paint, joins them that year, and it shows in work like this. He had settled on the single subject that would occupy him for the rest of his life: the human head. Here the face is built from flat zones of strong colour, reds and greens fenced in by dark contours, closer to a stained-glass window or a Russian icon than to the likeness of any particular woman. Jawlensky wanted the head to hold something larger than a portrait, a kind of inward, spiritual presence.