Spurred by the excellent Expressionists exhibition running through October 2024 at London’s Tate Modern, I am dedicating this week’s blog to one of my favourite artists, Baroness Marianne von Werefkin (1860, Tula, Russian Empire - 1938, Ascona, Switzerland).

An extraordinary personality in every single way, Werefkin (née Marianna Vladimirovna Veryovkina) is considered the first pre-Revolutionary avant-garde female artist.

Precociously talented, Werefkin became a private student of Ilya Repin, a renown painter and a key figure of the Peredvizhniki (“Wanderers”) group of Russian Realist artists who sought to make art more accessible to the masses in contravention of the academic restrictions of the time. Through Repin, she became acquainted with artistic and intellectual greats, including another private student, Valentin Serov.

An independent and lively personality with a strong will, Werefkin had little patience for roles allocated to young female aristocrats, eschewing stately balls in favour of dancing with the local villagers and hunting.

She lost the middle finger on her right hand in a hunting accident in her late 20s, after accidentally leaning on a loaded gun. Undeterred, she retrained her painting hand and continued on her artistic path.

After the Russian Realist and Impressionist phases of her youth, she continued to evolve and experiment with modernist artistic styles and ideology, contributing significantly to Expressionism and influencing the stylistic evolution of such greats as Wassilly Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Alexei von Jawlensky with whom she had a 27 year-long romantic relationship.

She met Jawlensky in her early 30s, placing her career temporarily on hold to nurture the talented but younger and less experienced artist.

Life with the notoriously unfaithful Jawlensky, whom she never married, could not have been easy. “Love is a dangerous matter,” she once wrote, “especially in Jawlensky’s hands”.

At the turn of the century when Werefkin was in her mid-30s, the couple moved to Munich following the death of her by then widowed father whose status as a decorated commander general in the Russian Imperial Army entitled her to receive a substantial Tsarist pension.

In Munich, she founded an influential “pink art salon” which over time led to the formation of several artistic groups, including most famously The Blue Rider which she founded with Jawlensky, Kandinsky and Kandinsky’s lover and talented artist Gabrielle Münter. The group eventually fell out but what a legacy they left!

The onset of WWI in 1914 was the first of three cataclysmic events that shook Werefkin’s life.

The war forced her and Jawlensky to flee from Munich to Switzerland within just 24 hours. Then in 1921, the Russian Revolution rendered her not only stateless but penniless when she lost the Tsarist pension. That same year, Jawlnesky left her for her maid, with whom he already had a child and whom he married the following year.

This may have broken a lesser person but not this indomitable woman. Werefkin found a way to go on, her spirit intact.

Settling in Ascona, on the shores of Switzerland’s Lake Maggiore, she continued to paint while earning a living working in graphics and as an agent for pharmaceutical products. Along the way she was supported, both emotionally and as much as they could financially, by friends and admirers of her art.

She spent the remainder of her long life in Ascona, writing in her diary in 1931:

“Ascona taught me to respect everything human, to love equally well the happiness of creation and the poverty of being, to carry it all within myself as a great spiritual wealth.”

Marianne Werefkin died on February 6, 1938. It is said that the whole of Ascona came out to see the artist on her last journey. To this day, her artistic and literary legacy is kept in Ascona, in the Fondazione Marianne Werefkin.