Alexej Jawlenski: Portrait of Alexander Sacharoff 1909
Jawlenski said something beautiful about his paintings. He said “they are songs without words”. It burned into me. His painting of Sacharoff captures me anytime I look at it. The thick, black eye shadow around the eyes, the vivid, red dress, and the one-side sneer freak me out. But the worst one is the expressive gaze. Wow.
Sacharoff wears dress and make up on the picture. He has a wig on his head. It is black to contrast his dead-white masked face. Sacharoff’s longish, narrow head, even more his gaze, is the focus point. You cannot do anything but look into his eyes. It is very expressive.
Expressionism was an artistic movement in the early twentieth century. The center of this cathartic style was Germany and Russia. Just think about the works of Grosz, or the silent movie Dr Caligari with the weirdly angled streets and buildings, the tall shadows in the uncanny scenes or Eizenstein’s pioneering montage technique.
Besides Berlin, Munich was the creative center in those years. Many Russian immigrant artists came to the city for its modernist atmosphere like the painter Kandinsky, or the modern dancer Sacharoff, and of course Jawlenski who painted him.
Jawlenski was a pupil of Ilya Repin in St. Petersburg but went to Munich with fellow artists to escape from the too realistic and tight Russian style in 1896. German expressionism impressed him very much. He liked to use intense, bright colors and preferred to paint portraits. Sacharoff was a friend of his.
Alexander Sacharoff came to Munich in 1905. With his gifted dancer wife Clotilde formed a modern dance group and toured around the world. The Sacharoffs had a weird, extravagant dancing style with vivid costumes and melancholic music. They changed their gender on stage, creating an androgynous idiom. Clotilde’s delicate, pretty form in masculine costumes and Alexander’s figure in dresses made sensational responses.
The Sacharoffs were friends with Kandinsky and Jawlenski and used to meet every day to discuss their works. One time Jawlenski created Clotilde’s stage make up; he painted a big red spot onto her forehead and a brown line on her nose, making her a living expressionist portrait.
One evening in 1909, Alexander stopped by Jawlenski’s studio before a performance in full make up and costume. He sat down for posing and Jawlenski painted him in a hurry because he had to go back to perform. He looked temptingly with his eyes and his energetic personality vibrates on the picture. It is palpable. He already transformed into his female role in soul and body. I wish I could see his performance that day. Alexander was mesmerized by the painting and brought it with him even if it was still wet. He was afraid Jawlenski would paint it over.
Every good day has to be over and the friends were interrupted at the end. Jawlenski became ill with arthritis, which was so painful that he had to find a new technique in order to work. His paintings became more simple, geometrical and spiritual in some way. “Art is a longing for God,” he said once.
The artist was expelled from Germany by the Nazis and lived in Switzerland in poverty. He bought a used, small easel from a photographer and in the next twenty years Jawlenski made his more than thousand abstract portraits and tiny landscapes on that easel.
Since moving his hands made him cry, he focused more on the colors than the forms. His works show many reddish faces, huge eyes, black contours and lots of dark color: works of a tortured soul.
Alexander and Clotilde were friends with Jawlenski until his death in 1941. The Sacharoffs continued their dancing career for a while and settled down in Italy. After her husband’s death in 1963, Clotilde sold their famous costumes and his portrait because of financial causes. Jawlenski’s painting of Alexander is now in the Lenbachhaus in Munich.
I have a hunch that Alexander really did not die. Surely he steps out from the frame and dances in the exhibition room every night. His vivid red dress whirls around him as he dances from one painting to another. When dawn comes with the first sunbeam he bows, collects the claps and then dances back into the frame. He sits down in his original pose and nobody knows what he just did. No signs bespeak, only his eyes.
