ALEXEJ VON JAWLENSKY (1864-1941) Bretonin

PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED PRIVATE COLLECTION
ALEXEJ VON JAWLENSKY (1864-1941)
Bretonin
signed 'A. Jawlensky' (upper right)
oil on board
52.5 x 49.6cm (20 11/16 x 19 1/2in).
Painted circa 1906
Provenance
Richard Kisling Collection, Zurich (acquired directly from the artist, circa 1912).
Private collection, Switzerland (by descent from the above in 1917); their sale, G. & L. Bollag, Zurich, 18 November 1929, lot 318.
Private collection.
Galerie Wilhelm Grosshennig, Dusseldorf (acquired by 1961).
Wilhelm Reinhold Collection, Hamburg (probably acquired from the above in the late 1960s).
Private collection, Germany (by descent from the above); their sale, Christie's, London, 28 February 2018, lot 518.
Private collection, UK (acquired at the above sale).

Exhibited
Zurich, Kunsthaus Zürich, Eine Zürcher Privatsammlung, 15 - 31 August 1913, no. 182 (dated '1910').
Dusseldorf, Galerie Wilhelm Grosshennig, Sonderausstellung Alexej v. Jawlensky, 3 - 31 October 1961 (titled 'Russischer Bauer').
Hagen, Osthaus Museum, Europäische Avantgarde, Vision und Realität, Malerei, Skulpturen, Arbeiten auf Papier, 29 September 2023 - 7 January 2024.

Literature
M. Jawlensky, L. Pieroni-Jawlensky & A. Jawlensky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Vol. II, 1914-1933, London, 1992, no. 1458 (illustrated p. 504).
S. Volkart, Richard Kisling, 1862-1917, Sammler, Mäzen und Kunstvermittler, Bern, 2008 (illustrated p. 85).

Alexej von Jawlensky was on a constant quest to unveil the spiritual in nature through colour. Bretonin is a striking early example of the painter's endeavour to reveal this mystical vision. The dark and modestly clad Breton figure stares directly back at the viewer, with wide eyes and an arresting expression. It announces Jawlensky's important contribution to portraiture and the beginning of his relentless exploration of the human face as a spiritual door between artist and viewer. He would later paint thousands of unique faces through increasingly abstracted and stylised means, all maintaining his iconic expressiveness.

Painted circa 1906, at a time when foreign painters would converge on France to learn from old and modern masters of the avant-garde, Bretonin prefigures Jawlensky's seminal contribution to 20th century portraiture and shows the artist's virtuoso ability to blend influences into what would become one of the most important artistic voices of Expressionism. Distorting objective reality and translating subjective emotions though colours, Jawlensky was a key proponent of German Expressionism and a founding member of the Munich-based Der Blaue Reiter group, alongside Gabriele Münter, Franz Marc, Auguste Macke and Wassily Kandinsky.

Der Blaue Reiter ('The Blue Rider') was the first of two distinct Expressionist groups that developed in Germany in the early 20th century, the second was the Dresden-based Die Brücke ('The Bridge'). The latter group comprised Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel. In contrast to Die Brücke, whose subjects were physical and addressed emotions arising from the surrounding environment, Jawlensky and other Der Blaue Reiter artists explored the spiritual in their art, which often included symbolism and allusions to ethereal concerns.

Born in Russia in 1864, Jawlensky initially started his working life in the military, only turning later to artistic pursuits. Compared to many other artists, he began studying painting rather late, in his mid-twenties, eventually leaving the army in 1896 to enrol in art school. The present work was painted barely a decade later, whilst Jawlensky was travelling in France and learning from the old and modern masters.

One artist whose footsteps he sought to retrace was Paul Gauguin, who had had a huge impact on the Russian painter. Jawlensky visited Britanny in 1905, two years after the death of Gauguin, and later recalled in his memoirs the moment he 'saw for the first time a painting by Gauguin, Riders on the beach in Tahiti. [He] liked the painting very much and it taught [him] a great many new things. [He] went on working for many years like this, searching for [his] own language.' (A. von Jawlensky, 'Memoir dictated to Lisa Kümmel, Wiesbaden, 1937', in M. Jawlensky, L. Pieroni-Jawlensky & A. Jawlensky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Vol. I, 1890-1914, London, 1991, p. 30).

In his unbridled search for primitivism, Gauguin visited Brittany on a number of occasions. As a letter he wrote to Émile Schuffenecker in 1888 testifies, Gauguin assimilated Breton folklore to a form of exotism, raw and pure: 'I love Brittany, there is something wild and primitive about it. When my wooden clogs strike this granite ground, I hear the powerful tone I seek in my painting.' (P. Gauguin, Correspondance de Paul Gauguin, 1873-1888, Paris, 1984, p. 172). In fact, despite the industrialisation of France that began in the 19th century, Brittany remained a fascinating enclave that resisted modernisation and retreated into its traditions and folklore, which fascinated the Parisian artists who visited by rail, fresh from the city. This led to the birth of the Pont-Aven School, a group of artists who gathered around the small town of Pont-Aven in Brittany. These artists, Paul Gauguin, Paul Sérusier and Émile Bernard, among others, used pure colours and chose the path of symbolism, to which Breton Celtic folklore lent itself particularly well.

Inspired, Jawlensky thus set off for Brittany, on a journey that would prove to be of the utmost importance. In his own words, 'In the spring of 1905 I went to Carentac on the coast of Brittany, where I did a great deal of work. There I came to understand how to translate nature into colour according to the fire in my soul. There I painted a lot of landscapes, bushes seen through the window, and Breton heads,' (A. von Jawlensky, in op. cit., p. 30), such as Bretonische Bäuerin painted around a year earlier than the present work. Although colour saturation is already present in Bretonische Bäuerin, Bretonin clearly shows Vincent van Gogh's influence, with its bold colours and thick expressive brushwork, as well as Jawlensky's choice to have a peasant figure as the subject. In Van Gogh's Portrait of Joseph Roulin, the artist also chose to paint a frontal portrait of an everyday figure of the working class, a postman. With its deceivingly and equally simple composition and intense use of unmixed colours, Bretonin also shares the same linear perspective, enforced by the monochromatic blue background.

The subject's thin face is gently hollowed out by her prominent cheekbones, evoking a slim worker's physicality. Her peasant headdress, yet another detail anchoring the portrait in reality, matches her jacket. Perhaps applying one of the Impressionists' main lessons about coloured shadows, Jawlensky translated the dark clothes into a subtle blend of blues, mauves, greens and oranges. Her dotted white scarf perhaps constitutes the only element of vanity in her demeanour.

The 'primitivist' theme of a rural Breton peasant as a central subject, which perhaps was inspired by Gauguin's La belle Angèle (1889), also makes the work a striking example of the Pont-Aven School's influence and how this developed beyond its core participants. This was translated differently among the artists that followed, such as in Ferdinand du Puigaudeau's Impressionist adaptation (lot 7), as well as through Jawlensky's virtuoso use of colours, borrowed from another key contemporary avant-garde group, the Fauvists.

Jawlensky's encounter with the Fauvists occurred in 1905, when he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. The same exhibition bore witness to the birth of Fauvism, and Jawlensky had a front row seat to the first artistic scandal of the 20th century, caused by a handful of painters condescendingly described by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles as the 'Fauves', meaning 'wild beasts' in French. In that group, Vauxcelles included Henri Matisse, Charles Camoin, André Derain, Henri Manguin, Albert Marquet, Maurice de Vlaminck and Kees van Dongen. Critics would soon describe their work as 'a can of paint thrown in the face of the public', 'shapeless bariolages' and 'delirious brushes'.

Following suit and rejecting the traditional and naturalistic use of colour, Bretonin shows the depth of Jawlensky's ability to handle pure colour and to play with the juxtaposition of contrasting primary and secondary colours. The pink and orange in the centre of the subject's face respectively respond to their complementary colours: the green in the face's shadows and the blue of the background. This creates a glowing visage with pulsing colours and transforms Bretonin into a spiritual apparition. In the artist's own words, in Brittany, 'for the first time in my life', 'I came to understand how to translate nature into colour according to the fire in my soul. [...] my paintings glowed with colour. [...] I had grasped how to paint not what I saw but what I felt.' (A. von Jawlensky, in op. cit., p. 30)

Fusing all these artistic influences into Bretonin, Jawlensky foreshadowed his primordial contribution to the Blaue Reiter group and German Expressionism in general. Focusing on the importance of subjective representation over objective fact, the painter brought to life the vivid vision of this Breton woman, in a portrait that goes beyond tangible reality, while projecting his own perception and inner vision of his subject onto the support via his model. In the words of his contemporaries, 'For this painter, art itself has the grace of a gesture: inner emotion is lent immediate expression, and visible everywhere is the creative force of an impulsive nature, which owes its best to the inspiration of the moment [...]' (Otto Fischer in 1912, quoted in H. Düchting, The Blaue Reiter, Cologne, 2009, p. 38).

Coincidentally confirming this statement, a landscape was discovered on the...