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Art of the 20th Century
Alexei Jawlensky
Alexei Jawlensky
(b Torzhok, Russia, 26 March 1864; d Wiesbaden, 15 March 1941).
Russian painter and printmaker, active in Germany. When he was ten, his family moved to Moscow. Following family tradition, he was originally educated for a military career, attending cadet school, and, later, the Alexander Military School in Moscow. However, while still a cadet, he became interested in painting. At the age of 16, he visited the Moscow World Exposition, which had a profound influence on him. He subsequently spent all of his leisure time at the Tret’yakov State Gallery, Moscow. In 1884 he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Samogita Infantry–Grenadier’s Regiment, based in Moscow. In 1889 he transferred to a regiment in St Petersburg, and later enrolled in the Academy of Art (1889–96), where he was a student of Il’ya Repin. Indeed his works of this period reflected some of the conventions of Realism (e.g. W. W. Mathé Working, 1892; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.). Seeking to escape the limitations on expression exhorted by the Russian art establishment, in 1896 Jawlensky and his colleagues Igor Grabar, Dmitry Kardovsky and MARIANNE WEREFKIN moved to Munich to study with Anton Azbe. Here he made the acquaintance of another expatriate Russian artist, Vasily Kandinsky. In Munich Jawlensky began his lasting experimentation in the combination of colour, line, and form to express his innermost self (e.g. Hyacinth, c. 1902; Munich, Lenbachhaus).
