1926

Abstract Head: Inner Vision-Rosy Light

Russian (active Germany), 1864 - 1941

A U-shaped curve anchors the image of a face in Abstract Head: Inner Vision – Rosy Light. Simple shapes are signs for the mouth, nose, and eyes; wavy lines on either side of the head are vestiges of hair; and cosmic circles float around the head. Jawlensky had moved toward this way of rendering faces in a 1917–18 series of pictures called Mystical Heads, compositions that often began as portraits of women in his circle of friends, but became otherworldly through his stylized mode of rendering, and in his Savior’s Faces series of 1917–20, with large and staring eyes that evoked the divine vision of mystics. In the Abstract Heads series of 1918–34, the eyes are closed to suggest a soul looking inward. In this series Jawlensky refined the connection between spirituality and abstraction by using an implied vertical-horizontal grid to make the face even more iconic and disembodied.