Wasserburg. Um 1906.
Oil on board, laid on canvas.
Jawlensky/Pieroni-Jawlensky 142 . 27,8 x 52 cm (10,9 x 20,4 in).
The small landscape "Stadt im Nebel - Wasserburg am Inn", oil on board, 30,9 x 47,8 cm (Jawlensky/Pieroni-Jawlensky 141) dated 1906 and made around the same time, has been in possession of the collection of the 'Städtischen Galerie im Lenbachhaus', Munich, since 1963 .

PROVENANCE: Galerie Otto Stangl, Munich.
Private collection.
Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York.
Galerie Alfred Gunzenhauser, Munich.
Private collection Southern Germany.

EXHIBITION: The Blue Four-Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York 30 March - 24 May, 1984, cat. no. 13 (with illu. in colors, p. 26, with label on stretcher).
Galerie Alfred Gunzenhauser, Munich 1987, no. 2.

Jawlensky only began his artistic training in 1889 in St. Petersburg after a career as an officer in the tsarist army. He studied under Ilja Repin who introduced him to Marianne von Werefkin and Helene Nesnakomoff, his later wife. Jawlensky accompanied these two to Munich in 1896 where they wanted to visit a private art school. Here Jawlensky met Wassily Kandinsky. The artist undertook several trips to France and was able to show ten paintings at the 'Salon d'automne' with the help of Sergej Djagilev. Jawlensky also met Henri Matisse for the first time. Initially his style was influenced by the Fauves and especially by Matisse. Later he attained his own expressionist style characterized by a strong coloring in a simple drawing style.

Towards the end of his late-impressionist and pointillist period, forms in Jawlensky‘s work became more condensed. Still differentiated, but already subject to a new view on things, landscapes made around this time are documents of a productive quest. Jawlensky‘s typical canon of colors shows exemplarily in the usage of shades of blue and red that play into purple. Following a motto of Impressionism that was still true for late Impressionism, the color black, declared as a non-color, is still absent. Subsuming single components to larger color surfaces, which would play an important role in his later works, is already hinted at in this landscape. What remains fundamental, however, is Jawlensky’s intuitive artistic gift that unfolds despite all conventions.

In summer 1908 he worked with Kandinsky, Marianne von Werefkin and Gabriele Münter in Murnau for the first time. There, the four artists developed the idea for the foundation of the 'Neue Künstlervereinigung München' to which they aligned with other artists. In December the first exhibition took place in Munich. Two years later the 'Blauer Reiter' was established as a new idea of co-operation. In 1913 Jawlensky participated in Herwarth Walden's first German autumn Salon in Berlin. When in 1914 world war I began, Jawlensky was expelled from Germany due to his Russian citizenship. He moved with his family and Marianne von Werefkin to Prex on Lake Geneva. And remained in Switzerland until 1921, where he began painting his abstract heads in 1918. His final move to Wiesbaden took place in 1921. In 1933 the National Socialists imposed an occupational ban on him. One year later the painter began the series of small-format 'Meditations'. 72 of his works were confiscated in 1937 as "degenerate". Three years later in 1941 Jawlensky died in Wiesbaden. [KD].