Alexej von Jawlensky, who had been living in Munich with Marianne von Werefkin since 1896, began exploring his unique artistic style around the turn of the century. He traveled throughout Europe, visited exhibitions, and engaged with the latest trends in French painting. In particular, the works of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, as well as those of the “Fauves”, influenced his development and led to a noticeable change in his palette and artistic vision.

He visited France for the first time as early as 1903, but it was not until a few years later, in 1905–06, that he visited Carantec in Brittany; however, Jawlensky’s letters provide only evidence of a stay in this Breton village northwest of Brest in 1906. The landscape there became a place of artistic revelation for Jawlensky. As he later described himself, it was here that he began to paint not what he saw, but what he felt.

This painting, too, was created in this setting and bears witness to his emerging artistic transformation. Set against a backdrop of fields and sky, he brings together the typical Breton stone buildings—adorned with colorful shutters—and a haystack reminiscent of Claude Monet into a vibrant whole, dissolving forms into vibrant areas that unfold dynamically across the canvas. He experimented with short, fluid brushstrokes and enhanced color intensity, which increasingly became the vehicle for his emotion.

His interest lies less in individual motifs than in the interplay of light and color, which manifests itself in the dynamic landscape with architecture, fields, plants, and sky. It is an intense testament to Jawlensky’s artistic awakening and his search for a deeply personal visual language. [AR]