Alexej von Jawlensky, Young Girl in a Flowered Hat, 1910, oil on cardboard (Albertina, Vienna)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re in the Albertina in Vienna, and we’re looking at Alexej von Jawlenksy’s brilliant painting “A Young Woman in a Flowered Hat.”
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:12] When you said brilliant, I think you meant that it was both brilliant in terms of its drawing and its conception but also in terms of its color.
Dr. Zucker: [0:20] I don’t think I can imagine a more radically painted or colored image.
Dr. Harris: [0:24] That orange is absolutely fluorescent.
Dr. Zucker: [0:27] This is Expressionism at its most extreme. Here’s an artist who was a Russian. He studied actually with Ilya Reppen, one of the leading Russian artists of the turn of the century, and then gives up that high-pitched naturalism for a kind of expressiveness that comes out of Matisse’s Fauvism and is related to the work of Kandinsky, who was a close friend for many years.
[0:50] We have — this is just the height of radicality in painting.
Dr. Harris: [0:53] Certainly emerging from the art of Gauguin also, and Van Gogh — Jawlensky was in the middle of that whole current — at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.
Dr. Zucker: [1:04] That issue is especially important for Russian artists like this, because as Gauguin was looking back to a more rural life and a more direct and pure life, for instance, in Brittany and in the South Sea most famously; the Russians were often looking back to their folk art.
[1:20] They were looking back to Russian icons. They were looking back to the simple printed billboards that were being produced at that time. They were looking for a kind of veracity, a kind of directness, a kind of truth in painting.
Dr. Harris: [1:32] There is a sense of primitivism here, although the figure has a sense of sophistication about her, an urban sophistication with that fabulous flower hat, and the lovely fan that she holds very modestly toward her face. But there is something primitivistic in the dark outlines, the abstraction, the sense of geometry.
Dr. Zucker: [1:57] I think you’ve gotten directly to the heart of the painting, for me at least, which is this serious conflict between the subject matter, which is modest and almost coy. You have this woman who’s not looking at us directly. There’s an emphasis on her eyelashes.
[2:12] There’s all of the accouterments of high fashion with the fan, with the hat, but then painted in the most violent, most aggressive manner one can imagine. There’s this expression of 20th-century modernism at its extreme.
Dr. Harris: [2:26] For me, it almost flips back and forth. Sometimes when I look at this, I see her and I see those beautiful long eyelashes, and the delicacy of her face, and the smallness of her red lips. Then other times I look at it and I almost flip a switch and I see harsh black outlines and the gestures that the artist made to create these forms, and there’s something very raw about that.
Dr. Zucker: [2:52] It’s raw, it’s strident. It’s just fabulous to look at.
Dr. Harris: [2:55] It’s also really pleasurable. The colors, although they’re bright, they’re harmonious, they hold together.
Dr. Zucker: [3:01] But they’re absolutely violent in relationship to the colors that we would expect. For instance, the woman has a green-yellow face.
Dr. Harris: [3:09] She does, but it works. Sometimes you hardly even notice. You have to remind yourself her face is green, because in a way it feels natural.
Dr. Zucker: [3:16] There is something that is beautifully artificial in that way. It’s as if this is light that is not the warm light of the sun, but this is the electric light of the modern era.
[3:27] This is not painting on canvas. This is not even on paper. This is actually on cardboard. The artist has allowed that rich brown color of the cardboard to come through in between the areas that have been painted.
[3:39] It reminds me actually of some of the work that was done by Toulouse-Lautrec at the end of the 19th century, where you had somebody who was interested in the artificiality of light in cafés, on stage. There is something about that here.
Dr. Harris: [3:53] Degas did that, too, with the ballerinas and the light on the stage.
Dr. Zucker: [3:56] That’s right. So there is this notion of the artificiality of color of light, of form, of representation itself, as very much a part of this early 20th century moment. This Expressionism, this deeply emotional expressive moment.
[4:10] [music]
