Alexej von Jawlensky studied first at the Fine Arts Academy of Saint Petersburg and then in Munich, where he met Kandinsky, among others. In 1905 he travelled to Paris to participate in the Salon d’Automne. He discovered fauvism and neo-impressionism, and met Matisse. In 1907 he returned to Munich, where he learned about French symbolism from Verkade. From 1908 he spent summers with Kandinsky in Murnau, in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, where he developed an original style combining influences from Jugendstil, Bavarian folk art, Russian icons and fauvism. In 1912, he took part in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition in Berlin. He lived from 1914 to 1921 in Saint-Prex, in Switzerland, where he met many other artists, including Arp and Archipenko.
His art became more abstract and started to incorporate religious themes. In 1921 he moved to Wiesbaden, in Germany, where he lived until his death in 1941. He maintained many contacts abroad, however, and in 1924 he founded the group Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four), in reference to the Blaue Reiter, with Feininger, Kandinsky and Klee. Jawlensky continued to paint, albeit in increasingly smaller formats. His quest to represent the invisible resulted in an art characterised by a sense of profound spirituality and a recurrent motif of wide black bands. He is represented in many German and French museums as well as in Wiesbaden.
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