Mystischer Kopf: Gelber Mund

At the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Jawlensky, a Russian national, was forced to leave Germany with only 48 hours notice, and he moved his family to Saint-Prex, a small Swiss town on Lake Geneva. During the next couple of years he worked on his Variations series, landscapes and portraits of girl's heads. The latter became the basis of new series of paintings, the Mystical heads, which he began after moving to Zurich in the late spring of 1917 and later continued in Asema. In the previous year Jawlensky met Emmy Scheyer, a young art student who was so enthralled by his paintings that she gave up her own career to promote his work. Many of the Mystical heads have Emmy's features--large almond-shaped eyes, a long straight nose and bangs. Jawlensky nicknamed her Galka ("jackdaw" in German) because of her jet-black hair. In 1924 she organized a tour in the United States of the works of Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Klee and Feininger under the name The Blue Four, and thereafter lived in California as their chief American dealer.