Portrait of Marianne Werefkin in 1888, painted by her Russian art-teacher then Ilya Repin; she is portrayed 28 years old, with a sling because of a hunting accident.
Gallery of Marianne von Werefkin
1914
Munich, Bavaria, German
Group photography. On the left, Alexei von Jawlensky, Clotilde von Derp, Marianne von Werefkin.
Gallery of Marianne von Werefkin
Marianne Werefkin with Alexander Werefkin (Peter Werefkin's son), 1910.
Gallery of Marianne von Werefkin
Marianne von Werefkin in her office in Ascona, 1925-1930.
Gallery of Marianne von Werefkin
Alexej Jawlensky, Gabriele Münter, Marianne von Werefkin and young Andreas in Murnau.
Portrait of Marianne Werefkin in 1888, painted by her Russian art-teacher then Ilya Repin; she is portrayed 28 years old, with a sling because of a hunting accident.
Marianne von Werefkin, born Marianna Wladimirowna Werewkina, was a Russian-German-Swiss Expressionist painter. Her shimmering tempera paintings contributed to the discourse of the Blauer Reiter group. She was known as the Russian Rembrandt in her youth.
Background
Mrs. von Werefkin was born in Tula, Russian Federation, on September 10, 1860. She grew up in an aristocratic family. Her father, Vladimir Nikolaevich Verevkin, was commander of the Ekaterinburg Regiment of the Russian Army, while her mother, Elizabeth Daraga, was a baroness and painter. Werefkin's childhood was spent travelling across Russia as her father was assigned to different locations, though family summers were always spent at the Blagodat Estate in modern-day Lithuania, assigned to her father for his services during the Crimean War by Alexander II. It was there, in her own private studio, that Marianna began to paint.
Education
Noticing the young child's enthusiasm and talent for art, Marianne von Werefkin's parents arranged for her to have private drawing lessons from the age of 14. A few years later, in 1880, Ilya Repin, at that time considered the most important Russian Realist painter, was assigned as her tutor. She studied with Repin for ten years, applying herself with a devotion that was only broken for a few months in 1888, when she accidentally shot herself in the hand whilst hunting.
Career
In 1892 von Werefkin met Alexej von Jawlensky, who desired to be her protégé. In 1896, after the death of her father, Marianne von Werefkin moved with her entourage to Schwabing in Munich, where she was soon hosting a famous salon where the art world gathered to discuss the latest developments. Von Werefkin was the primary theorist and stimulator of new ideas. By 1906 she had overcome her decade-long Jawlensky-crisis and returned to painting herself, and in the years up to the beginning of World War I she created groundbreaking works (such as her famous self-portrait) that, far ahead of their time, anticipated the trends of the future.
The village of Murnau in the Bavarian Alps became the birthplace of abstract painting in the summer of 1908, when the artist couple Gabriele Münter and Wassily Kandinsky joined Marianne von Werefkin and Jawlensky to live, paint, and debate there together. Kandinsky, with his essay "Über das Geistige in der Kunst" (1911/12; "Concerning the Spiritual in Art"), has usually been considered the leading thinker of the group. But it has since been shown by her biographer Fäthke that he took many of his ideas from her, without, however, mentioning their source.
Sometimes von Werefkin would return to Lithuania, which she considered her homeland. In late 1909-early 1910 Marianne von Werefkin, because of a leg ailment, had a lengthy stay in Kaunas with her brother Peter von Werefkin, who was then governor of Kaunas. This visit is described in detail in her letters to her artist friend von Jawlensky in Munich. She describes her daily activities, events, visits, acquaintances, reflections on art, and so on. She returned to Munich only after Easter in 1910.
In 1909 the Neue Künstlervereinigung München (NKVM; Munich New Artists’ Association) was founded. After an ugly intrigue, initiated by Kandinsky, Marc and Macke, the "Blaue Reiter" (Blue Rider group) split off from the NKVM. Von Werefkin also left the NKVM in 1912 and became "des blauen Reiterreiterin" (the Blue Rider’s woman rider), as her friend, the poet Else Lasker-Schüler called her.
In art she was interested in what did not exist in reality - the intangible, the invisible, the inaudible. She extolled this spiritual world of creativity as perfect, wonderful, miraculous, powerful, divine. Describing her art she conformed to the biblical phrase "My kingdom is not of this world." Rejecting the principles of positivism and the images of realism and naturalism, all symbolist painters could affirm this statement.
With the outbreak of the first World War von Werefkin moved with Jawlensky to neutral Switzerland. She lost her Czarist pension through the Russian revolution. Completely impoverished, but creatively unbroken, and supported by good friends and admirers of her work, she spent the last quarter of her long life in Ascona. She donated many of her paintings to the city, which today possesses the largest collection of Marianne von Werefkin’s works.
Two Children in front of a Billboard for Grand Cirque
The abandoned
Monastery garden
Church of Saint Anne, Vilnius
The Prayer
Ice Skaters
Nachtelijke stad met Gasthaus
Snow swirl
Soirée
Beer Garden
Fantastic Night
The Monk
Skaters
Moonlit Landscape
The Night Shift
The City of Grief
The Red Tree
Old Age
Man with Flock of Sheep
Twins
Stone Pit
Schnee über Nacht
Laundresses
The Rag-and-Bone Man
The Family
Styx
Love Eddy
Boarding School for Girls
The Factory
Untitled
After the Storm
Ave Maria
Homecoming
In the Theater I
Fruit Harvest in a Mountain Garden
Returning Home
Three Women at the Theater
At the Fountain
The Chandler
Moonlit
Church in St. Prex
Sunday in Spring
Police Post in Wilna
Abandoned
City in Lithuania
Storm Winds
Autumn
The Abandoned
Views
Quotations:
"Art lives and dies in the unique heart of he who carries it, just as all feelings only live and expand in the souls of those who feel them. There is no history of art - there is the history of artists."
"All bores me in the world of facts, I see an end, a limit to all things and my heart thirsts for the infinite and for eternity."
"Art is not made only one way, art is a point of view? Rembrandt in our days would be Rembrandt again, because the work of the master is his self. But in order to be Rembrandt in our day he would have used new ways that would give a new culture."
Personality
Marianne von Werefkin was an energetic, intellectual, and talented woman. Von Werefkin was appreciated by her contemporaries for her extraordinary charisma.
Interests
reading books on theosophy, philosophy, psychology, cosmogony, and astronomy
Music & Bands
Richard Wagner
Connections
Marianne von Werefkin met Alexej von Jawlensky, the impoverished officer, four years her junior, in 1892; he had just begun painting, while she had already exhibited and was recognized as the "Russian Rembrandt." Werefkin knew that Jawlensky was a skirt-chaser: "Love is a dangerous matter, especially in Jawlensky’s hands." She declined to marry him not least because of the generous pension from the Czar which she would have lost as a married woman. But she had decided that she wanted to promote and encourage him as an artist in every way possible. He should achieve in her stead and realize artistically everything from which, after all, a "weak woman" was barred anyway. "Three years passed in indefatigable care of his mind and heart. Everything, everything that he received from me I pretended to take - everything that I poured into him I pretended to receive ... so that he wouldn’t feel jealous as an artist, I hid my art from him."
Alexej von Jawlensky thanked her by sexually abusing nine-year-old Helene Nesnakomoff, the helper of Werefkin’s maid, with whom he was also already involved. In 1902 Helene gave birth to a son. Twenty years later, when Marianne von Werefkin was impoverished, she suited Jawlensky to distance himself completely from her, and he deigned to marry the mother of his son.