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Lot Essay
Painted in 1927, Abstrakter Kopf: Inneres Schauen breathes with spirituality. The series of 'Abstract Heads' was begun a few years after the end of the First World War, and it was in this group of paintings that Jawlensky truly pared back all the superfluous, all the details that had been in his earlier 'Heads' series (the 'Mystical Heads' and the'Saviour's Faces', of 1917-19 and 1918-20 respectively), creating a formalised template that allowed him to arrange colour in a mandala-like system, each colour used in a way that is the result of both judgement and a profound search for harmony, for the spirituality in the artist's own soul. In Abstrakter Kopf: Inneres Schauen, this is clear in the discreet colourism that pervades the work, with small flashes of rainbow-like bands of colour being used to articulate various areas of the head.
Discussing his use of the face as a form of template for these examinations of the spiritual, Jawlensky explained that,
'I found it necessary to find form for the face, because I had come to understand that great art can only be painted with religious feeling. And that I could only bring to the human face. I understood that the artist must express through his art, in forms and colours, the divine inside him. Therefore a work of art is God made visible, and art is a 'longing for God'. I have painted 'Faces' for many years. I sat in my studio and painted, and did not need Nature as a prompter. I only had to immerse myself in myself, pray, and prepare my soul to a state of religious awareness... They are technically very perfect, and radiate spirituality' (Jawlensky, letter to Pater Willlibrord Verkade, Wiesbaden, 12 June 1938, quoted in Alexej von Jawlensky: Catalogue Raisonnée of the Oil Paintings: Volume I 1890-1914, London, 1991, p. 34).
It is a tribute to the quality of Abstrakter Kopf: Inneres Schauen that it was formerly in the collection of Mela Escherich, a friend of the artist, a collector of many of his works and the author of one of the important monographs written on him during his lifetime.
Discussing his use of the face as a form of template for these examinations of the spiritual, Jawlensky explained that,
'I found it necessary to find form for the face, because I had come to understand that great art can only be painted with religious feeling. And that I could only bring to the human face. I understood that the artist must express through his art, in forms and colours, the divine inside him. Therefore a work of art is God made visible, and art is a 'longing for God'. I have painted 'Faces' for many years. I sat in my studio and painted, and did not need Nature as a prompter. I only had to immerse myself in myself, pray, and prepare my soul to a state of religious awareness... They are technically very perfect, and radiate spirituality' (Jawlensky, letter to Pater Willlibrord Verkade, Wiesbaden, 12 June 1938, quoted in Alexej von Jawlensky: Catalogue Raisonnée of the Oil Paintings: Volume I 1890-1914, London, 1991, p. 34).
It is a tribute to the quality of Abstrakter Kopf: Inneres Schauen that it was formerly in the collection of Mela Escherich, a friend of the artist, a collector of many of his works and the author of one of the important monographs written on him during his lifetime.