Landschaft, Am Genfer See

The present work was painted at the outbreak of World War I, upon Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin and his family's arrival in the small village town of Saint-Prex, on the banks of Lake Geneva. After fleeing Munich in August of 1914, the foursome found refuge here, thanks to a wealthy friend from Lausanne, A. von Khrushchov, who rented them a few rooms in the village. Without a studio, Jawlensky painted the landscape outdoors as he had earlier the same year in the south of France. Yet his traumatic experiences would not allow him to simply resume his most recent experiments. As he writes, "in the beginning at St Prex I tried to continue painting as I had in Munich, but something inside me would not allow me to go on with those...powerful, sensual works. I realized that my soul had undergone a change as a result of so much suffering and that I had therefore to discover different forms and colors to express what my soul felt" (quoted in "Memoir dictated to Lisa Kümmel, Wiesbaden, 1937," pp. 25-33 in M. Jawlensky, L. Pieroni-Jawlensky and A. Jawlensky, op. cit., p. 32).
It was on the banks of Lake Geneva that Jawlensky became fascinated by its transparent light and found these means of expression, working towards his distilled compositional abstractions. Landschaft, Am Genfer See is a perfect example of his new landscapes. An early example of the 1914 series, the colors are still Fauve and indebted to Henri Matisse's colorist vocabulary, but here he experiments with flattened perspective and structures the colorful fauna with horizontal bands of pale blue and pink.