Five years ago I spent two and a half months in Berlin, and every day I visited the museum to have at least a brief look at this divine masterpiece [a portrait of the soldier of fortune, Alessandro del Borro, then attributed to Diego Velazquez, and later to an unknown master], and every day my soul sang in response to it stronger and stronger. I was very sick then, and that genius alone reconciled me to my life when there was so much suffering in it. Looking at his creation, at these lines, at these half-tones (remember that shadowed jaw against the background or the column against the dress), at all this charm of the art, at this grand style, I started to want to live again, to see it again and again, to live on by painting and perhaps by painting alone.
Russian-German-Swiss expressionist painter (1860–1938)
Marianne von Werefkin (10 September 1860, Tula, Russia – 6 February 1938, Ascona, Switzerland) was a Russian-German-Swiss Expressionist painter and important contributor in the Munich artist-group Der Blaue Reiter. At the outbreak of the First World War, Werefkin and Jawlensky immigrated to Switzerland; in 1921 they separated. Werefkin stayed in Ascona, on Lago Maggiore where she painted her colorful imaginative landscapes in an expressionist style, till her death.
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