Der Blaue Reiter: Alexej von Jawlensky:
Spanish Dancer (Spanische Tänzerin), 1909
Oil on cardboard
100 × 69.5 cm (39.3 × 27.3 in)
Auctioned at Ketterer Kunst, 2024 for $9,171,800

In the summer of 1909 — the year Spanische Tänzerin came into being — Jawlensky settled in Murnau with Helene Nesnakomoff, the quiet, steady presence who had become his partner, their young son Andreas (presented publicly as a nephew), and Marianne von Werefkin, his long‑time companion and artistic interlocutor. It was a household full of emotional cross‑currents, yet also one of extraordinary creative energy. Together with Kandinsky and Münter, they painted side by side, exchanging ideas with a sense of discovery that seemed to quicken the air around them.

That summer marked a decisive shift. The four artists gradually loosened themselves from Impressionist habits and moved toward a more synthetic, expressive language of color. Jawlensky, already shaped by his encounters with the Fauves and early Cubism during earlier trips to Paris — and by the work of Matisse, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Picasso — brought a particularly forward‑looking intensity to the group. His presence helped steer their collective work toward a freer autonomy of color and a more summarised, concentrated handling of form. In Spanische Tänzerin, with its heightened palette and boldly simplified planes, one can feel that breakthrough directly: the moment when color ceased to describe and began to assert itself as an independent force.

Later that year, in December, the New Artists’ Association Munich held its first exhibition at Galerie Thannhauser. Instead of recognition, the artists met a storm. Critics attacked the show with unusual ferocity, scandalized by the “unnatural” colors in the works of Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Werefkin, and Münter. The public reacted with equal hostility — shouting, threatening, even spitting on the paintings. Their art, so alive and unrestrained, simply lay too far beyond what contemporary taste could accept. The chromatic freedom that feels so vital to us now was, at the time, experienced as an affront.

With time, the picture softens. What once provoked outrage now reads as courage: a small group of artists trusting their instincts, breaking with convention, and insisting on a new way of seeing. And Spanische Tänzerin, with its radiant defiance and its sense of first discovery, remains one of the clearest traces of that leap — a painting that still carries the heat of that transformative summer in Murnau.