The silent faces of alexej von jawlensky: When painting becomes prayer
Imagine a small room with white walls, bathed in a golden light that filters through linen curtains. On a worn wooden easel, a tiny canvas—barely larger than a hand—catches every ray. The colors dance like flames: a deep, almost mystical blue frames a face with purified features, where closed eyes seem lost in infinite meditation. This is not a portrait, but a modern icon, painted not to represent, but to reveal. The man holding the brush, Alexej von Jawlensky, spent his life searching for the very essence of the soul in these faces. And what if, behind every brushstroke, lay a much larger question: what if art were just another form of prayer?
By Artedusa
••7 min read
The exile who painted with his blood
Jawlensky was born in 1864 in an imperial Russia where Orthodox icons illuminated churches with their gilded backgrounds. The son of a colonel, he grew up between the splendor of the court and military rigor, before abandoning everything for Munich, where the air smelled of oil paint and artistic revolution. But it was in 1914, as Europe erupted in flames, that his fate took a dramatic turn. A Russian in Germany at the height of war, he was forced into exile. For seven years, he wandered between Zurich and Ascona, a small Swiss town where bohemian artists gathered to discuss theosophy and sacred colors.
It was there, in this forced retreat, that his Variations were born—landscapes reduced to their essence, where mountains became mere blocks of color, and the sky a vibration. But what struck most was how he painted: as if squeezing the tube directly onto the canvas, as if each brushstroke were an offering. "I do not paint what I see, but what I feel," he wrote to his friend Marianne von Werefkin, the Russian artist who was at once his muse, his rival, and his greatest influence. Their exchanges were electric, almost mystical. She spoke to him of symbols, of healing colors, of forms that spoke to the unconscious. He responded with faces increasingly stripped down, edging ever closer to abstraction.
The face as a landscape of the soul
Look at Abstract Head: The Savior (1919). What do you see? A pale oval, framed in black, where two dark lines suggest closed eyes. The forehead bears a red dot—as if a third eye, or a wound. The lips, barely sketched, seem to murmur a prayer. This is not a Christ, but the idea of a savior, a presence rather than a figure. Jawlensky did not seek to represent, but to evoke. His faces are open doors to something else: the invisible, the spiritual, what escapes words.
To understand this quest, one must return to his Munich years, when he mingled with Kandinsky and the members of Der Blaue Reiter. Unlike his friend, who saw abstraction as total liberation, Jawlensky remained attached to the human figure. But he stripped it down, simplified it, until it became little more than a sign, almost a hieroglyph. "A face must be like an open window onto the infinite," he said. And that is exactly what he achieved: his Abstract Heads (1918–1935) are a series of variations on a single theme, like visual meditations. Each version explores a shade of blue, a balance of forms, a tension between emptiness and presence.
Color as sacred vibration
If his faces fascinate, it is also because they are alive. Jawlensky did not paint with colors, but with pure emotion. Blue, for him, was never trivial: it was the color of the divine, of the infinite, the one he used for the backgrounds of his modern icons. Red, on the other hand, burned like passion or a wound. Green soothed, balanced, like a forest after a storm.
Take Abstract Head: The Red One (1923). The face is almost entirely red, framed by a black line that makes it stand out like a flame. The eyes are closed, the lips pressed tight—it looks like a martyr, or a man in a trance. Jawlensky believed colors had therapeutic power. "Blue heals, red excites, green calms," he wrote. His canvases were not merely beautiful: they acted, like visual mantras.
This approach was not unlike the theories of Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher who saw art as a means of elevating the soul. Jawlensky went further: for him, painting was an act of devotion. Each canvas was an offering, each brushstroke a prayer. And when, in the 1930s, arthritis gnawed at his hands until he could no longer hold a brush properly, he adapted. He fastened brushes to his fingers with adhesive tape and continued to paint, more slowly, more delicately. His final works, the Meditations (1934–1937), are masterpieces of minimalism: faces reduced to their simplest expression, almost abstract, where each line seems to have been placed with infinite care.
The artist and his double: Marianne von Werefkin
One cannot speak of Jawlensky without mentioning Marianne von Werefkin. This brilliant Russian painter was far more than a muse: she was his mirror, his spur, sometimes his enemy. Their tumultuous and creative relationship lasted nearly thirty years. She introduced him to theosophy, to hidden symbols, to the idea that art should be a spiritual quest. In return, he gave her portraits of rare intensity—like his Portrait of Marianne von Werefkin (1909), where she appears with piercing, almost hypnotic eyes, dressed in a red dress that seems to absorb all the light in the room.
But their artistic collaboration was also a rivalry. When Jawlensky began painting his Abstract Heads, Marianne explored more narrative, more literary forms. Their debates were legendary: "You simplify too much!" she once told him. "You complicate too much!" he shot back. Yet it was perhaps this tension that nourished their respective works. When, in 1921, they separated for good, Jawlensky lost far more than a companion: he lost a part of himself. His canvases grew darker, more introspective. As if, without Marianne, he now had to search alone for what he had once found together.
The scandal of "degenerate" faces
In 1937, as Jawlensky, aging and ill, lived in seclusion in Wiesbaden, the Nazis came knocking. Seventeen of his paintings were confiscated, deemed "degenerate." Among them, Abstract Head: The Savior—that face with closed eyes, so close to an Orthodox icon. The authorities saw in it "the face of a madman," proof of the decadence of modern art. Jawlensky did not understand. How could one condemn a prayer?
This condemnation was all the more ironic because his works were, precisely, attempts to transcend chaos. In a Europe torn apart by war, then by the rise of Nazism, his silent faces offered a form of resistance. They did not shout, did not scream—they meditated. And perhaps that was what disturbed them: in a world where everything had to be loud, visible, spectacular, Jawlensky proposed the opposite. Silence. Introspection. Faith in something greater than oneself.
The invisible legacy: when faces become icons
Today, when one looks at a Mark Rothko canvas, with its floating rectangles of color in infinite space, few think of Jawlensky. Yet it was he who first transformed color into an almost religious experience. His Meditations, those faces reduced to their essence, foreshadow the minimalist canvases of Agnes Martin or the luminous installations of James Turrell.
But his deepest influence may lie elsewhere: in the idea that art can be a form of secular spirituality. Jawlensky never renounced his Orthodox roots, but he knew how to reinvent them. His faces are not saints, but presences—beings who look at us without seeing us, who speak to us without opening their mouths. In this, they are universal. Whether you are a believer or an atheist, before a Jawlensky canvas, one feels as if touching something sacred.
The final brushstroke: when illness sculpts art
Jawlensky’s final years were marked by suffering. Arthritis ravaged his joints, forbidding the broad gestures, the generous impasto of his youth. But far from discouraging him, this constraint pushed him further into refinement. His Meditations are masterpieces of delicacy: faces almost abstract, where each line seems to have been placed with infinite care. "I paint with my heart, not with my hands," he said.
And perhaps that is the secret of his art: Jawlensky never sought to impress, but to touch. His canvases are not objects, but experiences. When one stands before Meditation: My Spirit (1935), that face with closed eyes framed in black, one feels as if plunging into a second state. As if, behind those simplified features, lay all that art can offer at its deepest: an open door to the invisible.
So the next time you encounter one of Jawlensky’s faces, do not ask who it represents. Ask yourself instead: what do you feel? Because it is there, in that silence between the canvas and you, that the answer may lie.