Alexej von Jawlensky

Painted circa 1913, Stilleben mit Kanne, is a wonderfully vivid composition that belongs to a highly innovative period of Jawlensky's oeuvre during which he created some of his most powerful works. With its strong colours and vigorous brushwork, this still-life reflects the influence that Fauve painting made on the artist. In 1905 Jawlensky met Matisse, whose work, together with the art of Gauguin and Van Gogh, exerted a major influence on his work at the time. In his memoirs, dictated to Lisa Kümmel in 1937, Jawlensky recalled: 'At the time I was painting mostly still-lifes because in them I could more easily find myself. I tried in these still-life paintings to go beyond the material objects and express in colour and form the thing which was vibrating within me, and I achieved some good results' (quoted in M. Jawlensky, L. Pieroni-Jawlensky and A. Jawlensky, op. cit., p. 30).

The artist's main preoccupation at this time was the rejection of impressionistic copies of nature and a move towards sensing the content, abstraction - expressing the extract.' It was a quest for a form which sought to fuse the impressions received from nature (the external world) with the experiences of the internal world. This search for 'synthetism' was to culminate in an art which presented perceived nature in all its beauty, cleansed, as it were, of all irrelevant forms. Adamant in its rejection of Impressionism, the artistic renewal postulated in these terms was expected to generate a painting which would be seen first and foremost as a surface on which colours and forms were arranged in such a way as to establish relationships (see Volker Rattemeyer, 'From the large figural representations to the 'Meditations' - Jawlensky's series' in Alexej von Jawlensky (exhibition catalogue), Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1994, p. 21).

After encountering the Fauves during the 1905 Salon d'Automne, where Jawlensky exhibited his works, the present still-life not only reflects the artist's admiration for works by Matisse but also for Cézanne's paintings, which he saw in Paris at the same time. The simplified shapes and naïve imagery in Stilleben mit Kanne can, however, also be traced back to indigenous Russian painting of the time. The present work is a beautiful culmination of all these different influences - the decorative pattern of the wallpaper is reminiscent of Matisse's work (figs. 1 & 4); the composition of the still-life can be traced back to Cézanne (fig. 5) and the objects themselves seem to recall Russian paintings of the same subject by artists such as Larionov (fig. 3).

In the autumn of 1911 Jawlensky went again to Paris where he renewed his acquaintance with Henri Matisse and was introduced to Kees van Dongen, which had a lasting effect on his art intensifying his use of bright and strong colours as present in Stilleben mit Kanne. 'From 1911 on, Jawlensky's works reflected his need for formal unity. He reduced his themes and introduced a greater degree of simplification and stylization; his lines, usually defining convex forms, derived greater expressive power from the contrast generated by elements whose plasticity resulted from colour, planes of virtually homogenous colour and purely linear means' (Volker Rattemeyer, 'From the large figural representations to the 'Meditations' - Jawlensky's series' in Alexej von Jawlensky (exhibition catalogue), Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1994, p. 22).