Marianne von werefkin workforce

I seek the person, the man, who would personify this ideal. As woman, demanding that which would give her inner world expression, I met Jawlensky … I thought I could create them in Jawlensky … A purely divine desire. Not attainable on earth. Was she indulging the genius cult of the 19th century, clinging to a bourgeois role model? Her marianne von werefkin workforce brings to mind that of sculptress Gela Forster, whose artistic activities came to a halt following her marriage to Alexander Archipenko.

Or that of the painter Minna Tube, who Max Beckmann demanded not touch a paintbrush as long as she was married to him. It is only after about eight years that Marianne von Werefkin, albeit secretly at first, began to paint again and eased herself away from her misbelief:. I have hell in my soul. I did not trust myself and that is why my life went to the devil.

I have a creative soul and was a slave to idleness … I became a whore and a kitchen maid, a nurse and governess, only to serve the high art, a talent that I considered to be chosen to complete the new work. What did I do to myself? Werefkin rented a large double apartment in Giselastrasse in Schwabing, where she forthwith hosted an influential salon and which became a much frequented meeting point for the cosmopolitan avant-garde.

There, on the Mediterranean, Werefkin resumed her artistic activity. InWerefkin created her first expressionist paintings. Stylistically, Werefkin followed the theories of Vincent van GoghPaul Gauguin 's surface painting, Louis Anquetin 's tone-on-tone painting, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 's caricature and bold painting, and the ideas of Les Nabis.

In the circle of friends in Munich, Werefkin was given the nickname "The Frenchwoman". He convinced Jawlensky of surface painting. The dancer Alexander Sacharoff became a member of the N. With Werefkin and Jawlensky he prepared his big performance at the Odeon in Munich. On 1 December was the opening of the first exhibition of the N. Werefkin exhibited six paintings, including Schuhplattlerher commitment to Bavarian folk art.

In the painting Zwillinge Werefkin [ de ] Twins was created. Shortly thereafter, Werefkin went to Lithuania to her brother Peterwho was governor in Kaunas. Many drawings and quite a few paintings were made there that winter. At the end of SeptemberFranz Marc made contact with the artists of the N. We learn from him that it was primarily Werefkin and Jawlensky who opened his eyes to a new art form.

From the beginning of MayPierre Girieud — lived with Werefkin and Jawlensky on Giselastrasse 23 when he and Marc showed his paintings in an exhibition at the Modern Gallery Heinrich Thannhauser. At the end of the year, they went to Paris, where they met Henri Matisse personally. In DecemberKandinsky left the N. InWerefkin and Jewlensky also left the N.

Werefkin also exhibited with the members of the N. In the marianne von werefkin workforce year, Werefkin intended the final separation from Jawlensky and travelled to Vilnius in Lithuania, where her brother Peter had meanwhile become governor. At the end of JulyWerefkin returned to Germany from Lithuania. She arrived in Munich on 26 July. When World War I broke out on 1 AugustWerefkin and Jawlensky had to leave Germany within 24 hours and fled to Switzerland with the service staff Helene Nesnakomoff with son Andreas, and Helene's sister Maria Nesnakomoff, who had earlier joined the household service.

Werefkin handed over the keys and custodian of her apartment to Paul Klee and his wife Lily before fleeing to Switzerland. At first, they lived in Saint-Prex on Lake Geneva. As a result of the war, Werefkin's pension was cut in half. Participation in Cabaret Voltaire followed after Werefkin had met its initiators. In some of Werefkin's works were shown at the Venice Biennale.

Werefkin always lived in Switzerland as a stateless person, issued with a Nansen passport since In Jawlensky separated from Werefkin and moved to Wiesbadenwhere in he married Werefkin's housekeeper Helene Nesnakomoff, the mother of his son Andreas. This group of artists had a large exhibition in in the Kunsthalle Bernfollowed by further joint exhibitions, including in in the Berlin Galerie Nierendorf together with Christian RohlfsKarl Schmidt-Rottluff and Robert Genin.

In the same year, she met Diego Hagmann and his wife Carmenwho saved her from greater economic hardship. Her progress was dealt a setback by a hunting accident in in which she accidentally shot her right hand which remained crippled after a lengthy period of recovery. By practicing persistently she finally managed to use drawing and painting instruments with her right hand again.

She began painting again in In she created her first expressionist works; in these she followed Paul Gauguin's and Louis Anquetin's style of "surface painting", while also showing the influence of Edvard Munch. The four artists frequently painted together in open air in and around Murnau. The NKVM, founded inbecame a forum of exhibitions and programming.

The simplified form and psychological content of works relate to the sources Werefkin admired at this time including the artist Paul Gauguin, Japanese woodcuts and the expressive works of the Nabis in France. Werefkin began exhibiting together with Blaue Reiter in It indicates Werefkin's departure from the Realist and Post-Impressionist styles of her early work, while not yet conveying the full scope of her Expressionist idiom.

Gouache, pen and Indian ink on wove paper - Private Collection. This painting shows a group of women walking down a street at night in an urban setting, carrying parcels and babies, in a slow-paced, heavily-loaded procession. Buildings line the road, while the dull glow of the lamplight creates a melancholy mood.

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The work depicts the city of Kovno in Russia - modern-day Lithuania - where Werefkin was staying with her brother in while recovering from a leg injury. Werefkin found the city of Kovno visually captivating, writing in her journal of the gloomy violets and dimness of the light, calling it "a treasure-trove for artists". But it was also the suffering of the city's inhabitants that preoccupied her, as she emphasized in her diary: "All that is here is suffering and this horror of beauty and this horrible life".

To better express the inner life of her subjects, she turned to techniques reminiscent of French Cloisonnism or Synthetism, the use of heavily outlined, flat blocks of color, from which light seems to emanate as through panels of stained glass. The somber mood of the piece is typical of much European art at this time, owing much to the Post-Impressionist style of Vincent van Gogh, who had depicted peasant women at work - in the fields, by the hearth - in similarly melancholic fashion.

The marriage of a Post-Impressionist, expressive use of color with a somber, anxious mood is in a sense the basis of Expressionism, which was emerging simultaneously across various Northern-European cities around this time. This is also one of the first pieces in which we find the figure of the stooped or hunched woman in black, a recurring motif in Werefkin's work.

In various respects, then, Return Home can be considered an important early painting of her mature period. The piece epitomizes many aspects of that group's approach to marianne von werefkin workforce, particularly in its stylised use of color, and its impression of psychological and spiritual intensity. Werefkin uses an array of bold colors and tones to convey her own inner life: intense blues and greens for the background; vivid browns, reds, and yellows for her skin, hat, and clothes.

The piece uses broad, loose brushwork, with the abstract patterning built up by the repetition of strokes across certain areas of the canvas assuming primary visual significance. In this respect, the painting shows the influence of Vincent van Gogh, whose innovative approach to brushwork Werefkin admired, while the dynamic, emotive use of color speaks to both Gauguin's work and that of the Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch.

Writing of Werefkin's membership of the NKVM, Adrienne Kochman states that she "often led discussions focused on the pursuit of an 'emotional' art of the future, recalling the work of Delacroix, Van Gogh, and Gauguin". Few paintings epitomize Werefkin's use of color to convey emotional content better than this Self-Portraitwhich is now one of her best-known works, and considered a key example of Munich-school Expressionism.

The piece is also described by an unknown original source as "one of the most unusual female self-portraits in the history of art", and it is difficult to argue, given the enigmatic, assertive expression of the face. This painting shows an old woman walking down a wide boulevard leaning on a crutch, approaching a distant town. She is surrounded by fields, and flanked by trees that seem to sway and bow in the wind.

To the right, two ladies shelter in a large red doorway. City in Lithuania was painted inwhen Werefkin had again traveled home from Germany to what was then a district of Russia, to recuperate from an injury while staying with her brother. Der Blaue Reiter, which shares its name with a painting by Kandinsky, was founded on the belief that colors and shapes could convey certain innate spiritual values, and that art could transport the viewer beyond the physical, tangible world by engaging them with these forms.

This painting sums many of those ideas, bearing obvious similarities to the work of other Blaue Reiter artists from the same period. The color palette, particularly the use of deep blues, is reminiscent of Paul Klee's contemporaneous work, while the convergence of diagonal lines towards the top-right of the painting can be comapred to Franz Marc's visually dynamic compositions, and his desire to find the underlying, organic rhythms of objects and living things.

At the same time, the painting shows the clear influence of French Post-Impressionism. The almost liquid quality of the road-surface, for example, and the way the trees seem to dance in the wind, is very reminiscent of Van Gogh's brushwork, and his depiction of rural, roadside scenes. If the piece indicates Werefkin's Expressionist affinities, it also speaks to her ongoing concern - perhaps owing something to her former tutor Ilya Repin - with depicting the grime and toil of everyday life, particularly the life of the downtrodden female laborer.

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Again, we find the motif of the hunched woman in black, while the subtly pervasive mood of loneliness, though indicative of the broader concerns of Expressionism, is unique to Werefkin's work. In this sense, City in Lithuanialike Werefkin's paintings of the Blue Rider period more generally, can be considered both exemplary and exceptional. Figures approach the lit doorway, hugging their shoulders inwards against the cold, while the window throws a pool of multicolored light onto the ground.

This work is a product of Werefkin's post-Munich period, created at some point between and as she travelled around Switzerland with her fellow artist Alexej von Jawlenksy, the pair having fled Germany at the outbreak of the First World War. Werefkin once stated "color bites at my heart", and this work indicates her ongoing fascination with color, combining various intense, vibrant hues within small areas of the canvas.

By this point, the extent of Werefkin's differences from other members of the German Expressionist movement is also clear. Whereas artists like Klee and Kandinsky had moved towards a purer form of abstraction, Werefkin's work remained wedded to figurative representation, and thus to the direct exploration of human life and society. In this sense, Storm Winds indicates her movement through and beyond the NKVM and Blaue Reiter groups, towards the unique form of landscape and city-scape painting that she would hone in her later years in Ascona.

Painted inthis work shows a rag-and-bone man, a kind of urban scavenger, leaning on a stick as he passes in front of an Alpine landscape. He is surrounded by a dark marianne von werefkin workforce, on which a small rowing boat drifts; in the background, mountains rise up to the moon as vast, hooded figures, while the sky explodes in yellow and black.

It was around that Werefkin relocated to the small lake-side town of Ascona in Switzerland, and this may be an early work composed in that setting. The depiction of large, simplified, organic shapes, and the use of intense color contrasts, reveals Werefkin's ongoing interest in the use of non-naturalistic color and shape to express the spiritual depths of people and things.

The skeletal appearance of the rag-and-bone man - a surrogate for the stooped women who appears across many of her works - epitomizes Werefkin's concern with the isolation and hardship of the poor city-dweller, while also suggesting the emaciating effects of war. A connection can also be established with works of Edward Munch's such as Despairwhich convey the loneliness of the human condition by setting a solitary figure against a dramatic landscape.

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Despite the urban connotations of its title, The Rag-and-Bone Man is a good example of Werefkin's approach to landscape painting, a genre she explored throughout her life, especially after her relocation to mountainous Switzerland as in late works such as The Duel The way that the mountains appear almost as animated human bodies indicates Werefkin's belief in the world of the spirit that lay behind physical reality, what Lauckaite calls her fascination with "what does not exist in reality - the intangible, the invisible, the inaudible".

In this case, the painting aims to reveal the supernatural force of the landscape. Painted four years before Werefkin's death, the religious subject-matter of The Monk is typical of her later work, in which the symbol of the crucifixion appears repeatedly.