Azar 1

The Mirror-Phase and Recognition of

the Other in Jawlenskys 1917
Niobe
Jason Azar
Dr. Schreyach: ARTH 4394
_______________________________________________________

Described as the painter of the human soul, (Werner 1965) Alexej von
Jawlensky painted interpretive portraits with the stillness and meditative qualities
of Russo-Byzantine religious Icons, and used a fauvist color palette in an attempt
to make physically visible the immaterial constituents of the human soul (Myers,
1957). Previous scholarship on Jawlenskys painted faces, predominantly of
women with patches of bright color on their cheeks and downward gazing
almond-shaped eyes, has tended to accept uncritically the artists fascination with
the human face as a means of accessing or witnessing the true self, or the soul
as Jawlensky would call it. Yet, the existing body of scholarship does very little to
elaborate on the operations by which Jawlensky motivates his faces to express
the true self.

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Bernard Myers (1957) approaches the subject from an ethnographic

perspective, referencing Jawlenskys involvement with the Blaue Reiter group
and their self-described inspiration from primitive art and more importantly, the art
of children. Myers points to the founding member of the group, Wassily
Kandinsky (1912), who writes that children have the ability to reveal the inner
qualities of an object through a nave rendering of the objects external form.
Jacques Lacan (1949) provides a psychoanalytic reading that bears on
Kandinskys observations, focusing specifically on the ability of young children to
recognize a being of non-self in their reflection. He goes on to assert that this
phenomenon, which he calls the mirror phase, serves to establish a connection
between the true self and reality, but that this relationship is immediately
severed by the subconscious perception of the other non-self.1 I will argue that
the true self must be understood as something we can only judge to be
achieved within or against the material and formal features of the painted surface,
taken as a face. With this understanding, I propose that Jawlenskys Niobe (figure
1) acts metaphorically as a mirror in which the viewer is able to encounter their
true self.

1 The recognition of the other stems from the subconscious understanding that the figure seen
in the mirror is in fact separate from ones self.

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In 1924 Alexej von Jawlensky joined Paul Klee, Kandinsky, and Lyonel
Feininger as a member of the Blue Four exhibiting group. Part of the larger Blaue
Reiter expressionists, it was at this point in his career that the artist joined the
other members of the group in their examination of the art of children. The Blaue
Reiter group placed the art of children on the same level as primitive art as a
primary source for inspiration, adhering to the belief that, the talented child
has the power to clothe the abiding inner-truth in the form in which this inner truth
appears as most effective.2 Kandinsky, the most voiced member of the
movement, was undoubtedly touched by the nave character of the childrens art,
but his admiration for that quality was overweighed by the childs capacity for
uncorrupted expressive capability.3 The Blaeu Reiter groups interest in this
uncorrupted expressive capability is substantiated by Barbara Wrwag, who
contends that at the beginning of the twentieth-century children were still largely
uninfluenced by pictures from the media, and that their creative energy centered
instead on the imitation of the natural world they encountered. Wrwag asserts
that the children of the Blaue Reiters fascination were far removed from
adaptation of already formed images, and retained a more direct relation to
2 Myers, Bernard Samuel. 1957. The German expressionists; a generation in revolt. New York:
Praeger, 202
3 Fineberg, Jonathan David. 1998. Discovering child art : essays on childhood, primitivism, and
modernism. n.p.: Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press.98

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objects they encountered and, correspondingly, a powerful directness of

expression.4
Jawlensky especially gravitated toward the ability of childrens art to reveal
an inner truth, and worked almost exclusively toward its pictorial rendering by
means of the human body, focusing specifically the human face. He painted
hundreds of faces over the course of his career, and the finished works were for
him self-described as being a medium for the experience of religious
transcendence.5 And while primitive in the sense that the faces have been
reduced to their most basic forms (being the eyes, nose, and mouth), Jawlenskys
link to primitive art rested in his desire to express uninhibited the human soul,
rather than an attempt to emulate early art. Writing to his friend, Dutch artist
turned monk Willibrod Verkade, Jawlensky explains his choice of using the
human face to express the true self: I had realized that great art should only be
painted with religious feeling. This was something I could only convey in the

4 Wrwag, Barbara. 1998. "There is an unconscious, vast power in the child" : notes on

Kandinsky, Munter and children's drawings Barbara Wrwag. In, Fineberg, Jonathan David.
1998. Discovering child art : essays on childhood, primitivism, and modernism. n.p.: Princeton,
N.J. : Princeton University Press., 72
5 Zweite, Armin, and Annegret Hoberg. 1989. The Blue Rider in the Lenbachhaus, Munich :
masterpieces by Franz Marc, Vassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Mnter, Alexei Jawlensky, August
Macke, Paul Klee. n.p.: Munich : Prestel ; New York, NY : Distributed in the USA and Canada by
te Neues Pub. Co, 89

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human face. 6 He believed the duty of art is to express, through forms and color,
that which is divine in ones self; for Jawlensky, art itself is a longing for the
divine.7 And while there is debate as to whose true self is being portrayed in
Jawlenskys faces, being either the artists own as argued by Wieler (1971) or the
greater human I as contended by Galka Schreyer (Jawlenskys close friend and
a frequent subject of his portraits) (Werner 1965), the artists personal accounts
indicate he was attempting to portray the divine (the other) within his own self. 8
Scholars have failed to move beyond the artists vague rationale for his
fascination with the face, accepting instead his ambiguous decree of religious
feeling, as demonstrated by Myers (1957), Werner (1965), Weiler (1971), and
Zweite (1989). In an effort to more fully understand Jawlenskys intentions and
yearnings, I argue that the artists faces can be most effectively examined
through a Lacanian analysis of self-recognition.
Instead of thinking of the viewer as an unbroken totality to whom the work
is subordinate and inaccessible, as was the prevailing attitude in the examination
of art at the turn of the twentieth century, Lacanian theory suggests the beholder
is fragmented and positioned as an invested and engaged subject by means of
6 The inner truth is presumed to be synonymous with the true self, the other, and the soul
(as used by Jawlensky).
7 Zweite, 93
8 Ibid, 93

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an automatic subconscious recognition of the other. 9 Lacan explains this

concept by suggesting the idea of a developmental encounter in which a child
first recognizes itself in a mirror as itself. This recognition is an illusion, he
argues, in that the image seen by the child does not literally correspond to itself,
as the object in the mirror is reversed. Thus, the moment of first recognition is
almost instantaneously mediated by a misrecognition of which the conscious
mind is unaware. The subconscious mind, however, perceives this illusion and
responds to the recognition of this other self with a sense of anxiety or
unease.10 Lacan explains the phenomenon as the subconscious recognizing the
other (what Jawlensky would call the soul, being a total entity in opposition to
the fragmented state of human consciousness) in the periphery of a mirror plane,
activating at a subconscious level the associations of the presence of the other
with anxiety and unease.11 Lacans notion of the mirror as a system for the
recognition of the other is significant in understanding how an object presented
on a canvas turns into an anchor point on which the subject is able to discover
itself. The canvas, acting as a mirror, contains an object that is accessible at a
subconscious level, because identification with the mirror canvas is inherently

9 Kelly, Michael. 1998. Encyclopedia of aesthetics. n.p.: New York : Oxford University Press., 82
10 Ibid, 83
11 Ibid, 83

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established at the level of the mirror stage. It is this relationship between viewer
and canvas that I believe most lends itself as a means of analysis to Jawlenskys
1917 Niobe.
Examining a personal letter to the German National Socialist Cultural
Commission in a request for permission to sell and exhibit his works, Jawlensky
describes his artistic motivation:
Every artist works in a tradition. I am Russian born, and as such my heart and soul have
always felt very close to old Russian art, and to Russian iconsThese arts would set up
a holy vibration in my soul, for they spoke to me in a language of deep spirituality. It was
this art that gave me my tradition.12

Jawlensky sensed the presence of the other in the direct portraiture of RussoByzantine icons (figure 2), and he interpreted the anxiety and primordial
awareness associated subconsciously with the confrontation with the other as a
feeling of divine contact. It was this sensation that the artist relentlessly pursued
through his career, focusing almost exclusively on the human face.
Jawlensky attempted in his art to replicate or activate the holy vibration of
Russian icons within in the material and formal features of Niobe.
Niobe is one of the more tragic figures of Greek myth, and was the
prototype of the bereaved mother, weeping for the loss of her children (figure 3).

12 Personal correspondence, Weiler, 11

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According to Homers Iliad, she had six sons and six daughters and boasted of
her reproductive superiority to the Titan Leto, who had only two children, the twin
deities Apollo and Artemis. As punishment for her pride, Apollo killed all Niobes
sons, and Artemis killed all her daughters. Niobe was so stricken with grief that
she fled to Mount Siplyus, Manisa, Turkey, where she turned to stone. Her grief
was so powerful that tears flowed ceaselessly from her forming the River
Acheloos.13 There are clear narrative and visual parallels between depictions of
Niobe and Mary, the prototypical weeping mother of Christianity. Jawlenskys
Niobe, then, is a union between the mythical Greek figure and the mother of the
Christian church.
The artist sought to reconcile the conflicting operations of mirrors and
Russo-Byzantine Icons, the former offering an immediate and distinct connection
with the beholder and the latter being the depiction of a far removed subject.
The painting is small, 15 5/8 x 12 1/8in, and similarly to the religious icons with
which Jawlensky felt a holy vibration, it invites the beholder to move physically
close to its surface.14 Additionally, we are drawn formally closer to his subject, a
downturned and down-gazing human face with blocks of bright color contained
13 Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s. v. "Niobe", accessed April 30, 2016,
http://www.britannica.com/topic/Niobe-Greek-mythology.
14 Dimensions: McNay Online Collection: Niobe." McNay Online Collection. McNay Art Museum,
2014. Web. 5 Apr. 2016.; Myers, 252.

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by thick black defining lines, through the artists foreshortening of the face to the
edge of the picture space, so much so that the top of the head is cut off at the
canvas edge.15 Further echoing the formal characteristics of Russo-Byzantine
icons, Jawlensky places his figure on a gold-tan ground (figure 2).
The size and immediacy of the face, combined with the viewers close
proximity to the painting, produces a mirror-like effect, as the face of Niobe is
roughly the appropriate size of a viewers face reflected in a mirror. Through
these formal techniques Jawlensky conjoined the reflective and involving nature
of a mirrored surface with the spiritual associations of religious icons,
transforming the canvas of Niobe into a metaphorical mirror with which the viewer
is able to encounter the other, or as Jawlensky would call it, the soul. In gazing
on Niobe, the viewer subconsciously associates the experience to the act of
looking in a mirror. In doing so, the viewer confronts the presence of the other,
recognized by the subconscious in the mirror-phase and ingrained fundamentally
into the observers psyche. Niobe then, taps into the inherent associations of
anxiety and awareness with the other, what Jawlensky interpreted as religious
contact.

15 Myers, 252

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A Lacanain analysis of Niobe has demonstrated that the artists sense of religious
contact with Russo-Byzantine icons can be understood as being his confrontation
with the other or the true self. The primordial holy vibration described by
Jawlensky was in reality his subconscious recognizing the presence of the
other, a sensation that he interpreted as a religious experience. In his effort to
recreate this phenomenon in his own work, Jawlensky implemented the use, in
broad brushstrokes, of the vivid colors and the foreshortening of the face that had
struck him on his first encounters with the icons of Eastern Orthodoxy. 16 The
mirror-like quality of his faces, including Niobe, allows the viewer to encounter the
primordial other from the mirror-phase, thus instilling onto the viewer the same
awareness of an alien presence that Jawlensky experienced with the religious
icons of his Orthodox upbringing.

16 Weiler, Clemens. 1971. Jawlensky: heads, faces, meditations. New York City, New
York: Praeger., 40

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Works Cited
Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s. v. "Niobe", accessed April 30, 2016,
http://www.britannica.com/topic/Niobe-Greek-mythology.
Fineberg, Jonathan David. 1998. Discovering child art : essays on childhood,
primitivism, and modernism. n.p.: Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press.
------------, Jonathan David. 2006. When we were young : new perspectives on
the art of the child. Berkeley : University of California Press, in association with
the Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art and Illinois at the
Phillips, a program of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Ecrits : a selection. n.p.: New York : Norton.
Lloyd, Jill. 1991. German expressionism : primitivism and modernity. n.p.: New
Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press.
Kelly, Michael. 1998. Encyclopedia of aesthetics. n.p.: New York : Oxford
University Press.
Myers, Bernard Samuel. 1957. The German expressionists; a generation in
revolt. New York: Praeger.
---------, 1957. Alexei Von Jawlensky. College Art Journal 16 (3). 212-217
Selz, Peter Howard. 1957. German expressionist painting.: Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1957.
Weiler, Clemens. 1971. Jawlensky: heads, faces, meditations. New York City,
New York: Praeger.
Werner, Alfred. 1965. "Jawlensky: painter of the human soul." Arts Magazine 39,
40-45
Wrwag, Barbara. 1998. "There is an unconscious, vast power in the child":
Notes on Kandinsky, Munter, and childrens drawings. In: Fineberg, Jonathan

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David. 1998. Discovering child art: essays on childhood, primitivism, and

modernism. n.p.: Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press.
Zweite, Armin, and Annegret Hoberg. 1989. The Blue Rider in the Lenbachhaus,
Munich: masterpieces by Franz Marc, Vassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Mnter, Alexei
Jawlensky, August Macke, Paul Klee. n.p.: Munich : Prestel ; New York, NY :
Distributed in the USA and Canada by te Neues Pub. Co

Figures

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Figure 1: Alexej von Jawlensky, Niobe, 1917. Authors photograph

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Figure 2: Cambrai Madonna. 1340. Cathedral of Our Lady of Grace, Cambrai

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Figure 3: Niobe, Roman copy of Greek bronze. Uffizi Gallery, Florence.