Der Blaue Reiter: Alexej von Jawlensky
Girl with Red Ribbon (Mädchen mit roter Schleife), 1911
Oil on board
71.5 × 50 cm (28¼ × 19 5/8 in.)
Auctioned at Christie’s in 2008 for GBP 2,932,500

There is a gentle steadiness in this portrait that draws you in before you realise it, as if the girl has been waiting in the frame with a quiet certainty all her own. Painted in the year Jawlensky later recognised as the true turning point in his development, Girl with Red Ribbon carries the confidence of an artist who has found the clarity of his line and the emotional weight of his colour. The red bow, set slightly to the shoulder, gives the composition a small lift, balancing the blue‑striped blouse with a quiet, natural asymmetry. Her dark hat, pulled low over her forehead, adds a bit of weight to her presence and softens the brightness of the bow. She feels grounded, neither idealised nor burdened, simply allowed to exist with a calm, inward light. The green background, brushed in broad strokes, sits close behind her and creates a simple, steady space that lets the figure come forward without distraction.

Jawlensky often spoke of the human face as a place where harmony could be gathered, shaped by his early encounters with Russian icons, and that sense of quiet focus is unmistakable here. The girl is not a symbol but a moment of stillness, held with a gentle, attentive eye. Her features are simplified but not emptied out; the slight colour in her cheeks and the firm line of her mouth give her a sense of self‑possession, a young sitter who meets the viewer without shyness. The clear contour along the jaw and the shadowed side of the neck shows him moving toward a more distilled form, yet the softness of the eyes keeps the portrait human and close. It is as if Jawlensky is testing how far he can simplify without losing the presence of a living person.

This inward approach to the face had already begun to draw like‑minded artists around him in Munich. Together with Kandinsky, Jawlensky stood at the centre of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM), a group formed by artists searching for a more direct, expressive language. The NKVM gathered painters who wanted to show inner states rather than outward likeness, and Jawlensky’s portraits, with their calm frontality and strong colour, became an important part of that shared search. His belief that the human face could hold “all the beauty and harmony of the world” gave these works a quiet strength that set them apart from more narrative painting of the time.

Tensions within the NKVM would soon lead Kandinsky and Franz Marc to break away and form the Blaue Reiter, with which Jawlensky would also come to be associated. Seen from that perspective, Girl with Red Ribbon sits at a crucial moment, on the threshold between a structured artists’ group and the looser, more visionary circle of the Blaue Reiter. The painting shares their wish to move beyond description into something more concentrated, but it does so on an intimate scale, through the encounter with a single young sitter. In this girl’s face—frontal, calm, and quietly bright—Jawlensky’s search for a more spiritual image becomes deeply human, a brief pause of clarity before the turbulence of the years ahead.