Meditation
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A face reduced to its barest structure with a dark vertical line and a dark horizontal line forming a cross, dividing the surface into four fields of color: pink at the lower left, dark green at the lower right, teal-green at the upper left, and yellow-green at the upper right. A strip of blue runs along the left edge. The paint is applied in thin, vertical strokes, the board is visible beneath. This is from the Meditations, a series of small, near-abstract face paintings Jawlensky made between 1934 and 1937 as progressive arthritis gradually immobilized his hands. By the end he was strapping the brush to his wrist and working on boards no larger than a postcard. Jawlensky was a Russian-born painter who co-founded the New Artists' Association of Munich with Kandinsky in 1909. The Nazis declared his work degenerate and banned him from exhibiting in 1933.