Mädchenkopf was painted around 1913, at the height of the artist's involvement with the Blaue Reiter, and is a distillation of the varied stylistic concerns that preoccupied Alexej von Jawlensky during the early 20th century. Looking back at the pre-war years, the artist himself identified this phase in his career as crucial: “I painted my finest... figure paintings in powerful, glowing colors and not at all naturalistic or objective. I used a great deal of red, blue, orange, cadmium yellow and chromium-oxide green. My forms were very strongly contoured in Prussian blue and came with tremendous power from an inner ecstasy... It was a turning point in my art. It was in these years up to 1914, just before the war, that I painted my most powerful works” (quoted in “Memoir dictated to Lisa Kümmel, 1937”, in M. Jawlensky, L. Pieroni-Jawlensky & A. Jawlensky, op.cit., p. 31). By using a broader palette of intense colors and heightened differentiation in detail, the great portraits he painted during this t.mes , which rarely identify the sitter, take on a t.mes less identity. From this point on, Jawlensky would always return to the face as a means to explore the range of human emotion throughout his career. By 1913, the overpowering, explosive portraits of the two previous years began to recede into the dignified, more muted heads of his later career. Undoubtedly, this is why Jawlesnky considered this year to be a “turning point” in his career.

The works from this period tend to portray sitters with narrow, more pointed faces, probably inspired by Jawlensky’s friend Alexander Sacharoff, whose androgynous appearance was also captured in an electric portrait painted in 1909. Sacharoff was an artist who was committed to developing the expressive aspect of modern dance, and his rule-bending performances opened a new creative realm for Jawlensky.

The stretched proportions of the sitter’s head can be seen in other portraits painted around 1913, and while not always explicitly named, Sacharoff’s influence is clear.

Mädchenkopf’s power lies not only in the shape of the figure’s face and her downcast eyes, but in the intense color-palette Jawlensky chose to depict her with. He uses thick, parallel brushstrokes of green and pink contrasting with the blue, zig-zagging background. An electric band of pink defines the sitter’s shoulders. One cannot help but make the comparison to Henri Matisse’s seminal Fauvist portrait Portrait de Madame Matisse. La raie vert. Like Matisse, who famously remarked, "I used color as a means of expressing my emotion and not as a transcription of nature," Jawlensky believed that color communicated the complex emotions of his subjects (quoted in J. & M. Guillaud, Matisse: Rhythm and Line, New York, 1987, p. 24).

The present work can be viewed as a synthesis of the ideas he explored in the years before the war. Jawlensky and Kandinsky exhibited with the Fauve painters in Paris at the legendary 1905 Salon d'Automne where the artists of that movement showed their works for the first t.mes and the name “wild beasts” (fauves) was coined. Cézanne also exhibited paintings at the same Salon so Jawlensky not only encountered works by artists such as Vlaminck and Matisse, but also by the “father of Modern Painting”. Both influences undoubtedly appear to be reflected in the present work. Here he is clearly grappling with the ideas of the Cubists, whose work he would have seen in Paris during a trip there in 1911. In the present portrait in particular, there is an emphasis on three-dimensionality and distinct, fragmented brushstrokes placed next to each other to create a sense of space. As Clemens Weiler has noted, “Cubism… supplied Jawlensky with the means of simplifying, condensing and stylizing the facial form even further, and this simplified and reduced shape he counterbalanced by means of even more intense and brilliant coloring. This enabled him to give these comparatively small heads a monumentality and expressive power that were quite independent of their actual size” (Clemens Weiler, Jawlensky Heads Faces Meditations, London, 1971, p.105).

This painting, along with the work Mädchen mit roter Schleife which was sold at Replica Shoes ’s in 2012, were first owned by Dr. E. Mayer, a dentist in Wiesbaden who accepted the works in lieu of payment from the artist. Jawlensky moved to Weisbaden in the early 1920s and the city is now home to the Wiesbaden Museum which houses one of the largest collects ions of his work. This is the present work’s first appearance at public auction in over 50 years.