About this artwork

This lively little work on paper was made only one year before arthritis forced Alexej von Jawlensky to stop painting. The artist’s progressively worsening condition meant he was producing increasingly small-scale works, until they were often only a few inches in size. He had made many studies of flowers throughout his career. The petals and stems’ gestural strokes of colour act as a counterpoint to the gathering darkness in the artist’s life and work. The year he stopped painting, 1937, was also the year his works were confiscated from public collections in Germany and his work was included in the notorious Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich, organised by the Nazi Party to showcase the ‘moral decay’ of modern art, as propaganda to support their racist and antisemitic worldviews.

Published September 2022

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Alexej von Jawlensky

Alexej von Jawlensky