1923

Abstract Head: Inner Vision-Night

Alexey von Jawlensky

Russian (active Germany), 1864 - 1941

Inner Vision – Night a belongs to a sequence of iconic renderings of the human face by Alexei Jawlensky known as his Abstract Heads.

The artist began working in series in 1914, with a sequence of repeated small-format views of the scene outside his window. In the Abstract Heads Jawlensky painted between 1918 and 1934, the linear architecture of the image of a face is unchanging. It’s the selection of colors that varies from picture to picture. Sometimes those colors are vividly bright and shining, and other times, as in Inner Vision – Night, they are dark and ethereal. Jawlensky interpreted these vibrating colors as a kind of mystical light. He also ascribed a spiritual force to his serial working method: repeating a schema of the face hundreds of times in the Abstract Heads series was for Jawlensky like an act of meditation or prayer. Seriality was a way to paint with religious feeling.