Russian- born German expressionist artist Alexej Jawlensky was born in Torzhok, in the Russian Empire, in 1864. At age ten he moved with his family to Moscow. After several years of military training, he became interested in painting, visiting the Moscow World Exposition in circa 1880. Here his good social connections facilitated a move to St. Petersburg, where – from 1889 to 1896 – he studied at the art academy, discharging his military duties whilst doing so.

Jawlensky gained admittance to the circle of the renowned Russian realist painter Ilya Repin. There he met Marianne Werefkin, a wealthy artist and former student of Repin. He requested to be protégé and Werefkin put her work on hold to promote his, providing him at the same time with a comfortable lifestyle.

Jawlensky and Werefkin moved to Munich in 1894. In 1905 he met Ferdinand Hodler, and two years later began his long friendship with Jan Verkade and Paul Serusier. It was also in Munich that Jawlensky met Wassily Kandinsky and various other Russian artists. Together they contributed to the formation of the Neue Kunstlervereinigung Munchen. Kandinsky seemed to have considerable influence upon him: his academic work transformed into innovative paintings that pushed forward the avant-garde, using freer, more expressive colours. Between 1908 and 1910 Jawlensky and Werefkin spent summers in the Bavarian Alps with Kandinsky and his companion, painter Gabriele Munter. Here they experimented with each other’s techniques through paintings of their mountainous surroundings.

Following a trip to the Baltic coast and renewed contact with Henri Matisse in 1911 and Emil Nolde in 1912, Jawlensky turned increasingly to the expressive use of colour and form alone in his portraits.

Following the general disintegration of Der Blaue Reiter as a result of World War I, Jawlensky fled to Switzerland until 1922. Throughout the 1920s, he consistently and rigorously exhibited in Western Europe and the United States as a member of the progressive group Die Blaue Vier. Despite his German citizenship, Jawlensky was included in the Degenerate Art Exhibition organized by the Nazis in 1937.

His works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Museum Wiesbaden, Germany, which holds many of his best-known works.