From 20 September 2020 to 10 January 2021, the Museum of Modern Art in Ascona (Switzerland) hosts an important retrospective that explores the relationship between Alexej Jawlensky (1864-1941) and Marianne Werefkin (1860-1938) who, individually and in pairs, made a fundamental contribution to the development of art in the early twentieth century.
For the first time, the exhibition compares these two original figures of artists, through 100 works which retrace the careers of both, in a period of time that from the end of the nineteenth century, reaches up to the thirties of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to their private relationship.
The exhibition, curated by Mara Folini, director of the Ascona Art Museum, is the third and final stage of an itinerary that has touched two of the major German institutions for expressionist art, such as the Städtische Museum im Lenbachhaus in Munich and the Museum Wiesbaden.
The extremely complex relationship that linked Alexei Jawlensky and Marianne Werefkin developed between 1892 and 1921, from their beginnings in St. Petersburg, to Munich (1896), a city that saw them at the center of the international artistic debate of the time, as founders of New Association of Artists of Monaco (1909), introduction to the birth of Blaue Reiter(1910) and of the revolutionary abstract art of their friend and compatriot Vassilj Kandinsky, to which Marianne Werefkin was able to give theoretical foundation in her writings, up to the years spent in Switzerland, in particular in the village of Ascona, where Werefkin herself was very active in the field cultural, in participating in the foundation of the Municipal Museum (1922) and of the artistic association Der Grosse Bar (1924)
The two were much more than just a couple of artists, deeply connected from an emotional point of view: they seemed dependent on each other, life partners, linked in an "erotically platonic love relationship" (as he way of emphasizing Lily, Paul Klee's wife), who actually hid the unease of a woman who, in order to establish herself in a world declined to masculine, decided to repress her femininity in the name of art as a mission.
The exhibition itinerary follows the chronological line of theirs Liaison, begun in the spring of 1892, through their common master Ilya Repin, one of the most important Russian realists, supporter of an art that would emancipate the Russian people and "bearer" of Rembrandt's chiaroscuro in his homeland; Repin was a decisive figure for Marianne Werefkin, before her transfer to Germany, as evidenced by his Self Portrait from 1893, one of the rare examples of his initial creative phase.
Having abandoned the artistically conservative and limiting Russian environment, the couple moved to Munich in the autumn of 1896, to start over on new bases and stimuli, flanked by great personalities of art such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Alfred Kubin, Gabriele Münter , Franz Marc, Agust Macke and others.
It is the period in which Marianne Werefkin gave up painting and, instead of pursuing personal artistic glory, devoted herself to promoting Jawlensky's talent. As she herself wrote: “What could I achieve by working, even in an admirable way? Some work that maybe won't be bad. (…) If I don't paint and devote myself entirely to what I believe in, the only true work will see the light, the expression of artistic faith, and for art it will be a real conquest. That's why it's worth living."
These are years in which many female artists reflect on their identity. At the time, in fact, their contributions enjoyed little attention from the public, disinclined to recognize in them a necessary originality and creativity.
This voluntary exemption lasted a decade. What interrupted him was the progressive deterioration of the relationship between the two, due to the entry of another woman, their maid Helena Nesnakomova, with whom Jawlensky had woven a love affair and from whom his son Andreas was born in 1902; to this was added the choice of Jawlensky to pursue a new artistic path, different from the one proposed by Werefkin, in the role of his guide.
Having regained confidence in his means of expression, in 1906 Werefkin began to paint again and switched to tempera painting already free from Van Gogh-like post-impressionist stylistic elements (still present in Jawlensky's painting and in that of his friends Kandinsky and Münter), and who instead referred to Gauguin and the Nabis, in experimenting with the most diverse techniques – gouache, pastels, charcoal, chalk, pens and pencils – mixing them in contrasting fields of color, towards a rhythmic, serial, enveloping and mostly visionary composition.
These are works that demonstrate how much Marianne Werefkin was the forerunner of that new expressionist language which took shape, starting in 1907, in her works and in her very numerous and feverish sketches, and which she brings as her contribution to the fertile sojourns of Murnau (1908, 1909 ), a town in the Bavarian Pre-Alps, remembered by critics as the most significant for Kandinsky's abstract turning point.
In the paintings after 1906 we notice all the peculiarities that will continue to characterize the work of Marianne Werefkin, such as the symbolic and oppressive background atmosphere (stimulation), or the fantastic scenarios dominated by a visionary and lyrical character. From a stylistic point of view, all these works bear witness to how much Werefkin had made the lesson of the French synthesists his own, basing his works in basically geometric and serial two-dimensional compositions (ellipses, shortened perspective lines, sinuous linearity that sometimes breaks), thanks to the 'wise use of'flat and cloisonné, in the more classic style of Paul Gauguin and then of the Nabis. Examples in this regard Autumn-School (1907) Beer garden (1907) Sunday afternoon (1908) The dancer Alexander Sakharov (1909) The skaters (1911)
As for Jawlensky, his first decade in Munich had highlighted how color was his medium par excellence; a figure that already accompanied him in the pre-war period, with the series of colored pastes and heads that he will sublimate in those Mystics (since 1914), to then arrive at those hieratic and gloomy of the meditations, in the last years of life.
At the outbreak of the First World War, the two were forced to take refuge in neutral Switzerland; first in Saint Prex on Lake Geneva (1914), then in Zurich (1917) and finally in Ascona (1918). For the first time they experienced poverty and lived in hardship and as exiles without a homeland. They will remain together for another six years, despite the fact that their paths had by now taken different directions from a sentimental and artistic point of view. Jawlensky made the leap towards a lyrical and mystical abstraction which would eventually culminate in the increasingly radical, peremptory dark crosses of his late production in Wiesbaden (1921-1938), where he had moved in 1921, abandoning Werefkin in Ascona.
Marianne Werefkin will continue along the road of a more radical expressionism, in increasingly emphasizing the forms in swirling, vitalistic movements, which coincide with a recovery of more existential and earthly questions, between the visionary and the anecdotal, to finally find, in the last years of his life, an intimate reconciliation with the world, thanks to his renewed interest in the Franciscan love of which Ascona, welcoming homeland of artists, will become a cosmic symbol of a long-awaited inner peace.
The itinerary ideally closes with a section dedicated to the works of Andreas Jawlensky, son of Alexej and Helena Nesnakomova, who found his artistic maturity right in Switzerland, cultivated in the presence of his father and Marianne Werefkin.
The exhibition is the result of a successful collaboration between the Museum of Modern Art of Ascona with the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus of Munich and the Museum Wiesbaden, without forgetting the contribution of the Jawlensky Archive of Muralto and the Marianne Werefkin Foundation of Ascona.
Cover image: Marianne Werefkin, Moonlit Night, 1909-10, Tempera and mixed media on paper laid down on chipboard, 55 × 73 cm, Private collection
