Variation

Alexej von Jawlensky was a Russian Expressionist painter active in Germany. He gave up a career as an officer in the Tsarist Imperial Guard to study under Ilya Repin in St. Petersburg, then moved to Munich in 1896, where he became a close friend of Wassily Kandinsky and a co-founder of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, the group that would split off in 1911 to form Der Blaue Reiter — the most important German Expressionist circle of the early twentieth century. He met Matisse in Paris in 1905 and exhibited alongside the Fauves at the Salon d'Automne. Expelled from Germany at the outbreak of World War I, he spent the war in Switzerland, where he made the Variations series — small abstracted landscapes built from blocks and ovals of pure color. This one dates to around 1918. Vertical bands of olive, ochre, white, deep red, magenta, navy, peach, yellow, pink, and black are arranged side by side, with white and yellow ovals floating among them. Jawlensky's work was later seized by the Nazis and shown in the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition.