ART REVIEW : Facial Expressionism

Is Alexei Jawlensky a major minor artist or a minor major figure in modern art? If there is any argument about the stature of the Russian-born Expressionist, it boils down to such meaningless nitpicks.

He wasn’t a Picasso or a Matisse, but most critics agree that Jawlensky combined Russian and French traditions in a unique brand of romantic modernism. The history of early 20th-Century art isn’t complete without the series of human heads he painted over a period of about 20 years. Ranging from passionate evocations of humanity to mystical abstractions, the many faces of Jawlensky were nothing short of a religious quest.

There isn’t much disagreement either over the fact that the Norton Simon Museum has the largest and most important Southern California collection of Jawlensky’s work. The 74 oils, 13 watercolors, 45 drawings, 10 prints and various letters at the museum are part of the Galka Scheyer Collection, which was entrusted to the Pasadena Art Museum in 1953 and taken over by Norton Simon in 1974.

But even devotees of this treasure may not remember the last time it was displayed in a big way. The year was 1964, when the Pasadena Art Museum celebrated the centenary of the artist’s birth. Now--26 years later--we have “Visions and Icons: The Art of Alexei Jawlensky,” an exhibition of about 100 artworks and related correspondence, at the Norton Simon Museum to Dec. 30. The exhibition, which fills two galleries on the lower level, offers an opportunity to savor Jawlensky’s art and to get a taste of the romantic notions and artistic influences that shaped his work.

As we are reminded, Jawlensky (1864-1941) was not born to be an artist. The son of a Russian Imperial Army colonel, he was sent to military school and commissioned as a lieutenant, but his mind was never far from art. In 1896, after studying at the Imperial Art Academy in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad), he resigned his commission and set off to study art in Munich with fellow artist Marianne von Werefkin.

So began a peripatetic existence in Germany, France, Russia, Italy and Switzerland that ended in 1922 when Jawlensky finally settled in Wiesbaden, Germany. Early on he met Wassily Kandinsky, a fellow Russian who would have an enormous impact on the evolution of modern art and on Jawlensky’s use of color as form. Jawlensky also was affiliated with artists who came to be known as German Expressionists, and in 1909 he helped to found the New Artists Assn. in Munich.

Traveling in Germany and France before World War I, Jawlensky saw the most exciting art being created in that tumultuous period. He soaked up the work of the Post-Impressionists and the Fauves, as well as early Picasso and Matisse. The influence shows, but so does his childhood familiarity with Russian art forms. In a posted statement, written in 1939, Jawlensky said, “I am Russian born. As such my heart and soul have always felt close to Russian art, to Russian icons, the art of Byzantium, the mosaics of Ravenna, Venice and Rome and the art of the Romanesque period. All of these arts would set up a holy vibration in my soul for they spoke to me in a language of deep spirituality. It was this art that gave me my tradition.”

Jawlensky stands tall in an international circle of modernists who collectively changed the face of art in the early 20th Century. And in Jawlensky’s case, the face was very much the point. He pursued two basic themes--landscapes and human heads--but the landscapes were largely a war-time interlude, undertaken during an escape to Switzerland, when Jawlensky said he wasn’t up to the intense challenges that he brought to the face.

“Visions and Icons” contains no stronger example of Jawlensky’s Expressionistic calling than the 1911 painting “Blonde.” Executed with the strong color and dark outline of a stained-glass window, this image exudes the emotional fervor of a baptism by fire. Passion, evil, hope and dread seem to churn about in agitated brushwork that composes a face whose lips are ringed with chartreuse and dark eyes are shadowed like a mask. Far from the fragile blonde of Hollywood sex-goddess lore, this hardened woman is put together with vibrating line and pure, unnatural color.

“Blonde” and other vividly painted heads also recall Russian religious images. Their stylized features, including almond-shaped eyes and compact, oval heads, suggest Byzantine madonnas. When two faces appear in a single work, as in “Child With Doll,” Jawlensky seems to update an ancient tradition of depicting the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child.

His art cooled a bit as the war heated up, and he put the series heads on hold during a retreat to Italy and Switzerland. “I wanted to continue to paint my powerful, intensely colored pictures, but I felt I couldn’t. My soul did not permit me this sensual kind of painting,” he wrote. Instead, Jawlensky turned to “more spiritual” landscapes.

He had painted hard-hitting landscapes earlier in his career, but a lovely series of landscape “Variations,” executed from about 1914 to 1919, convey a gentler religious faith. In these small, vertical compositions, soft oval-shaped poofs of pastel color are often organized in forms that suggest church windows and portals.

When Jawlensky returned to heads, he developed an increasingly abstract approach. He dissolved sculptural form and pushed contours off the page, filling space with luminous, staring faces. In the 1920 watercolor-and-ink work, “Head With Open Eyes,” for example, a few tremulous lines and strokes of ethereal color form a fragile, transcendent face.

Within a few years, Jawlensky straightened lines and solidified colors into geometric abstractions that suggest the human visage with the sparest means. His final faces were dark, ominous sheets of brush strokes that look as much like crosses as schematic heads.

Norton Simon Museum of Art, 411 Colorado Blvd., Pasadena; Thur.-Sun., noon-6 p.m., to Dec. 30.