From then on I used to go to the Tretyakov Gallery [in Moscow] every Sunday, arriving very early and staying there without eating until closing time … - Alexej von Jawlensky

I now began to search for a new path in art [from 1914, with the outbreak of World War 1.]. It was a major task. 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.

..human faces are for me only suggestions to see something else in them – the life of colour, seized with a lover's passion.

My paintings [c. 1907] were aglow with colors and so my soul was contended with them.