Alexej von Jawlensky was born on 13 March 1864, in
Torzhok, a town in
Tver Governorate,
Russia, as the fifth child of Georgi von Jawlensky and his wife Alexandra (née Medwedewa). At the age of ten he moved with his family to
Moscow. After a few years of military training, Only because of his good social connections, he managed to get himself posted to
Saint Petersburg and, from 1889 to 1896, studied at the art academy there, while also discharging his military duties. In Munich he met
Wassily Kandinsky and various other Russian artists, and he contributed to the formation of the
Neue Künstlervereinigung München. His work in this period was lush and richly coloured, but later moved towards abstraction and a simplified, formulaic style. Between 1908 and 1910 Jawlensky and Werefkin spent summers in the Bavarian Alps with Kandinsky and his companion, the painter
Gabriele Münter. Here, through painting landscapes of their mountainous surroundings, they experimented with one another's techniques and discussed the theoretical bases of their art. 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. Expelled from Germany in 1914 due to
World War I, he moved to
Switzerland. He met
Emmy Scheyer in 1916. Jawlensky gave her the affectionate nickname, Galka, a Russian word for
jackdaw. She became another artist who abandoned her own work to champion his in the
United States. After a hiatus in experimentation with the human form, Jawlensky produced perhaps his best-known series, the
Mystical Heads (1917-1919), and the
Saviour’s Faces (1918-1920), which are reminiscent of the traditional Russian Orthodox icons of his childhood. In 1921, Alexej von Jawlensky returned to Germany and took up residence in
Wiesbaden. There, in 1922, he married Werefkin's former maid Hélène Nesnakomoff, the mother of his only son, Andreas Jawlensky, who was born before their marriage (1902). In 1924 he established the Blue Four, whose works, thanks to Scheyer's tireless promotion, were jointly exhibited in Germany and the US. From 1929 Jawlensky suffered from progressively crippling
arthritis, which necessitated a reduced scale and finally forced a cessation in his painting in 1937. He began to dictate his memoirs in 1938. He died in
Wiesbaden, Germany, on 15 March 1941. He and his wife Helene are buried in the cemetery of
St. Elizabeth's Church, Wiesbaden. ==Legacy==