Marianne von Werefkin: L’Amazzone dell’Avanguardia, Museo di Roma in Trastevere, closed February 14th | Berkshire Review for the Arts
Marianne von Werefkin (1869 – 1938) is one of those rare artists whose words and sketches almost tell us more about her paintings than the paintings themselves. The words are found in her Lettres à un inconnu written while travelling through Brittany, Paris, and the Provence with artist/companion Alexej von Jawlensky. The sketches, initially outlined in ink and later colored in with pastel or tempera, were her way of satiating an irrepressible “thirst for the abstract” which she subsequently expressed in her full-scale works.
This collection of fifty temperas and a dozen drawings, together with the above-mentioned sketches and portions of her diary, bring to light the charisma and intelligence that earned her such appellations as the “Russian Rembrandt” and “Amazon of the Avant-garde”. Oppressed by the limitations, tedium, and mediocrity of the external world, Werefkin relied a unique, figurative style to illustrate her love for the “things that are not”. The artist’s calling, she claimed, is to counter the reality of perceived things with the “unreal” things of the soul.
