Goddess Of The Dawn

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In Goddess Of The Dawn we celebrate daybreak. We experience it as glory, holding it in a divine, sacred embrace.

Visually our dawn explodes in a burst of soft but intense colours. Andrei Jawlensky's Abstract Head paintings were a way for him to reach the divine. Likewise, our words are from Homer's Illiad, where divine powers also bridged the heavens and earth in human form. 

The Russian, Alexej von Jawlensky was closely associated with Kandinsky and a key member of ‘The Blue Rider’ group. He worked as part of an indispensable core of artists driving the promotion and development of early abstract painting.

As his work developed towards abstraction he focused on the human face, deconstructed and stylized, to express through form and colour 'the divine within him'. 

Jawlensky's divine dawn is named Aurora, the Latin word for dawn, and the goddess of dawn in Roman mythology and Latin poetry. This name is a continuation of the Greek goddess of morning, Eos, who 2700 (or so) years earlier, appears in the Illiad arrestingly described as 'the rosy fingered' in a 'robe of saffron':

'Now when Dawn in robe of saffron was hastening from the streams of Okeanos, to bring light to mortals and immortals' — Iliad (19.1)

'But soon as early Dawn appeared, the rosy-fingered, then gathered the folk about the pyre of glorious Hector.' — Iliad (24.776)

The glorious, tragic reality of humanity's mortality is laid bare in the Iliad. Making passages of such beauty like that on ART WRD Goddess Of The Dawn, ring with even greater power.

Combined, Jawlensky and Homer's depictions of morning give us a sublime celebration of daybreak to carry with us, nomatter how dark the night becomes. In Goddess Of The Dawn we carry Dawn as she blooms in the hearts of men - and Gods...as an incalcubly wondrous part of their soul's creation.

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The Artwork

Abstract Head: Aurora

Alexej von Jawlensky 1931

Jawlensky’s later work was marked by a number of series of paintings focused on the human face, where his depiction of the features becomes increasingly stylised and abstracted. 

The Abstract Heads series is characterised by a long, symmetrical U-shaped face - a structure first conceived in 1918. Jawlensky worked on this series until 1935. His strong interest in Indian philosophy and the life of Indian yogis is evident in the meditative eyes combined with the distilling of the compositions to the purest elements of colour and line. We see Jawlensky abandoning signs of individuality and character, and focusing on formal elements. The Abstract Head series, whilst expressing individual themes and mood, all conveys a sense of harmony and universal spirituality.

In Aurora, Jawlensky’s soft yet radiant tones and assertive lines deliver huge power through the anonymous, universal face. His time as a key member of the Blue Rider expressionist movement can only have primed his profound mastery of colour displayed here. His acquaintance with Cubism from 1910 gave him the means to stylize and simplify the facial form. These elements combined with his aim to capture and communicate the spiritual through his work, make for a series of monumental expressive power.

The Artist

Alexej von Jawlensky

1864 - 1941

A key figure in the Blue Rider group alongside Kandinsky and Klee, Jawlensky was at the centre of the early Abstract and Expressionist movements. His depictions of faces are recognisable in the genius of their repetitive variations, bold use of colour and their influence from the Russian icons he grew up surrounded by. 

Jawlensky’s meditations on human form and spirituality produced paintings with beautiful hues in bold blocks, described by the artist himself as ‘meditation and prayer in colour’. Jawlensky strongly believed that ‘great art can only be painted with religious feeling’, and his work, particularly his portraits, combines religion, meditation and repetition in a spectacularly vibrant style. 

His method of working and focus on the divine while painting his extraordinary portraits was reminiscent of the repetitive aspect of mindfulness and meditative practices. In describing his artistic process, Jawlensky said ‘I sat in my studio and painted, and I did not need nature to prompt me. It was enough for me to immerse myself in myself, to pray and prepare my soul to attain a religious state’. 

His exploration of form in his portraits became increasingly abstract towards the end of his career which was cut short by crippling arthritis in 1937. His focus on exploring his relationship with the subject came to be centred solely on his bold variations on the human face. 

Born in Russia in 1864, his career began in the military, but a posting in St Petersburg gave him the opportunity to discontinue his military duties and study painting at the art academy in the city instead. 

He moved to Munich in 1894 with the wealthy artist Marianne von Werefkin, who had taken him up as her protege, and remained in Germany until he was expelled at the start of World War I. It was during his time in Germany that he met fellow Russian painter, Wassily Kandinsky. He and Kandinsky were founding members of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, exhibiting their work across Germany. His earlier work while summering in the Bavarian Alps with Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter in 1908 - 1910 saw him focus on landscapes, but soon after this he began to use expressive colour and form almost exclusively in his portraits.

Two of his most famous series of portraits, which he began towards the end of the First World War, are ‘Mystical Heads’ and ‘Saviour’s Faces’. Here, the artist’s work demonstrates his own ruminations on spirituality and reflects society’s desperate need to find new meaning and value following the horrors of a war that shook the world.

Both paintings in this sections are self portraits by Jawlensky.

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The Words

Iliad

Homer - 8th Century BC

The Iliad is an epic, intensely dramatic story. An explosive cocktail of war, bravery, sacrifice, revenge, mortality and fate. The words of Goddess Of The Dawn are taken from Alexander Pope's celebrated translation published between 1715 and 1720. They are an apporiately powerful dressing of the stage for such a tale. Here is our quote in a fuller excerpt from Pope's text:

As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night,
O'er heaven's clear azure spreads her sacred light,
When not a breath disturbs the deep serene,
And not a cloud o'ercasts the solemn scene;
Around her throne the vivid planets roll,
And stars unnumbered gild the glowing pole,
O'er the dark trees a yellower verdure shed,
And tip with silver every mountain's head;
Then shine the vales, the rocks in prospect rise,
A flood of glory bursts from all the skies.

The Writer

Homer

c. 800 BC – c. 701 BC

The legendary figure of Homer is considered to be the father of ancient Greek literature – the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Two epic poems that shaped Classical culture, and whose narratives still resonate today. 

In telling the story of Homer, you immediately confront an uncertainty – the aptly named Homeric Question. Essentially this asks whether an actual person called Homer ever really existed. And if he did, was he the single author of The Iliad and The Odyssey? The other main, opposing view is that these great works were the product of multiple contributors, over an extended period – a process of addition and revision. 

The Homeric question continues to be debated. Perhaps he was a blind, oral poet, born somewhere between 750-1200 BC, in the regions of Ionia, Smyrna or Chios. Or he was the face of a legion of writers. What is certain is that Homer only exists in relation to his two great poems. 

The Iliad is not an account of the Trojan War, but rather a human (and sometimes divine) story set against its background. After Paris kidnaps Helen of Sparta, taking her to Troy and provoking the war with the Greeks, it tells tales of bravery, sacrifice, wrath and revenge, performed by warriors, heroes and kings such as Ajax, Hector, Achilles, Agamemnon and Odysseus. 

It is the cunning Odysseus, the mind behind the trick of the Trojan Horse, who links Homer’s two epics. The Odyssey is the tale of his perilous, decade-long journey home after the Siege of Troy. It is the narrative from which we draw the legends of The Cyclops, The Sirens, and the figurative expression ‘lotus eater’ for an apathetic, pleasure-loving person. 

Together, the two poems’ universal themes of heroism, struggle and homecoming underpin Western storytelling – from antiquity, to Chaucer to Shakespeare, to Tolkein, to comic books, to Joyce’s Ulysses, to the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?

"My friends, the apples that I love for their delightful red, yellow, mauve and green clothing cease to be apples for me when I see them against this or that background, in such or such surroundings.. .And they resound in my sight like a music, reproducing this or that mood of my soul, this or that fleeting contact with the soul of things.. .To reproduce the things which exist without being, to reveal them to other people, by passing them through my sympathetic understanding, by revealing them in the passion I feel for hem, that is the goal of my artistic existence. To me apples, trees, human faces are not more than hints as to what else I should seen in them: the life of colour, comprehended by a passionate lover." c. 1903; as cited by Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers

"I understood that I did not have to paint what I saw, not even what I felt, but only that which lived within me, in my soul. To put it in symbolic terms, it is like this: I felt within myself, within my breast, the keyboard of an organ and I had to make it resonate. And the nature that was in front of me served me only as a prompter. And that was a key that unlocked this organ and made it resonate. In the beginning it was very difficult. But little by little, it became easy for me to use colours and forms to find what was within my soul" From a letter, 12 June, 1938 to P. Willibrord Verkade

“...like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.” 
― The Iliad

“Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier; 
I have seen worse sights than this.” 
― The Odyssey

"Sleep, universal king of gods and men. "
― The Iliad

"The Fates have given mortals hearts that can endure."
― The Iliad

"If only strife could die from the lives of gods and men
and anger that drives the sanest man to flare in outrage—
bitter gall, sweeter than dripping streams of honey,
that swarms in people's chests and blinds like smoke."
― Achilles in The Iliad

"There is a time for many words and there is a time also for sleep."
― The Odyssey

"Here let us feast, and to the feast be joined
Discourse, the sweeter banquet of the mind;
Review the series of our lives, and taste
The melancholy joy of evils passed:
For he who much has suffered, much will know,
And pleased remembrance builds delight on woe."
― The Odyssey, (Alexander Pope translation)

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