The woman with an oval face and a rounded hairstyle in Purple Lips appears repeatedly in Alexei Jawlensky’s work of 1912. Her identity is unknown—but portrait-like individuality was not the artist’s focus. Instead, he made many generic depictions of human faces that were differentiated by their stylization in raw colors and essential forms. Jawlensky subscribed to a distinctly modern belief that shapes and colors convey intrinsic feeling and emotion; he intensified his shapes and colors in order to intensify the effect. In Purple Lips, as with other heads Jawlensky painted in this period, the head-and-shoulders depiction nearly fills an almost square format, so that the entire composition glows with densely concentrated marks and splotches of color.