Lisa Kmmel

The present work is a portrait of Lisa Kmmel, a student of arts and crafts and an amateur painter. Jawlensky met her in 1927, and shortly thereafter, she began sitting for him as a model. As Jawlensky grew ill in the 1930s, Kmmel acted as his secretary and traveling companion until his death in 1941. In 1937, the artist, devastated by his progressive paralysis and by the inclusion of his works into the infamous Entartes Kunst exhibition, dictated his memoirs to Kmmel, who made the inventory of all the works left in his studio and reorganized Jawlensky's entire oeuvre.

In the images depicting Kmmel, Jawlensky typically focused on her head and top of shoulders, as shown in the present painting. The bright, non-naturalistic colors of her face accentuate her attractive features. The simplified treatment of Kmmel's face foreshadow Jawlensky's metaphysical paintings of abstract heads.