Art: THE SOLDIER WHO WANTED TO PAINT

OF the art-struck Russians who at the turn of the century flocked to Munich to study painting, one of the best was Alexei Georgievich Jawlensky. In the 1920s he ranked with the more famous Russian Wassily Kandinsky, the late U.S.-born Lyonel Feininger and Swiss-born Paul Klee (TIME, Sept. 17) as a coequal in their “Blue Four” exhibits. Then he was all but forgotten.

This year the work of Jawlensky (pronounced Yav-lensky) is having a spirited revival that has brought a round of exhibits in Germany, London and Paris, and a current show at Manhattan’s Kleemann Galleries (see color page). Chief reason: the release of nearly 100 Jawlensky paintings, by his 75-year-old widow, who lives in Wiesbaden. The new showings have placed Jawlensky with Kandinsky and Chagall among the best of Russia’s 20th century painters.

From birth, Alexei Jawlensky, son of a Czarist colonel, was pointed toward a military career. But he wanted to paint. Sent to cadet school in Moscow and later commissioned in an infantry grenadier regiment, Jawlensky petitioned for a transfer to St. Petersburg, where as an officer he could study painting. Finally he resigned, to take off for Munich with another young painting enthusiast, Baroness Marianne Werefkin. Six years later the handsome, passionate and strong-willed Jawlensky had a child by Marianne’s young ward, Helena Neznakomov, who became his devoted wife.

Taking his painting cues from Gauguin, Van Gogh and Matisse, Jawlensky learned to orchestrate the hot, fauve colors in the series of portraits that rank as his best work, teamed up with Kandinsky on summer painting vacations outside Munich. Their favorite pastime: placing their paintings on a piano for a Russian pianist to interpret in music.

At the outbreak of World War I, Russian-born Alexei Jawlensky took refuge in Switzerland, after being expelled from Germany without being permitted to take along so much as one painting. To his aid came a young German painter, Emy Scheyer, one of the many women who found Jawlensky’s combination of bearlike strength and artistocratic charm irresistible. She gave up painting to devote her life to promoting his work, built up her own collection to include more than 120 of Jawlensky’s works, which, along with those of Klee, Kandinsky and Feininger, are now kept intact as a permanent Blue Four exhibit at the Pasadena Art Museum.

Depressed by poverty and exile, Jawlensky retreated further into himself, began painting the series of abstract mood poems that show his color sense at its peak. After the war he returned to Germany, only to have the Nazis in 1939 declare his art “degenerate.” Hopelessly crippled by arthritis, only able to hold his brush painfully with both hands and paint with shoulder movements, Jawlensky devoted his last years to small, dully glowing, abstract heads of Christ. His final works before his death in 1941 were basically meditations. Said he: “Great art can only be created with religious feeling. Art is longing for God.”