A male figure in the foreground; in the background—as a “picture within a picture”—a framed portrait of a woman. Both figures adopt a similar posture and are looking in the same direction. With its free, gestural brushwork and intense coloration, the double portrait He and She belongs to Alexej von Jawlensky’s early Expressionist works. The painting depicts one of the most outstanding artist couples of the avant-garde: He—that is Alexej von Jawlensky himself; she—that is Marianne von Werefkin.

The two met in 1892 while Jawlensky was studying at the Academy in St. Petersburg through Ilya Repin, the most important representative of Russian Realism. Werefkin, Repin’s former private student, was already a recognized artist at the time and supported Jawlensky. As a couple, they moved to Munich in 1896; their partnership would last nearly 30 years. Werefkin saw Jawlensky as a means to achieve a higher goal: she wanted to establish a new art form through him, as she feared she could not achieve this on her own due to her lower social standing as a woman. At the same time, she lets Jawlensky take the lead as a man: “Everything, everything he received from me, I pretended to take—everything I put into him, I pretended to receive as a gift. […] [S]o that he would not be jealous as an artist, I hid my art from him.” 

Against this backdrop, the double portrait can also be read as a symbol of a complex, ambivalent relationship in which Jawlensky, while placing himself dominantly in the foreground, still has Werefkin as a frame of reference in the background. In fact, Jawlensky’s style developed rapidly at the beginning of the 20th century. Under Werefkin’s influence, as well as through trips to Paris, where he encountered works by Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Henri Matisse, among others, he left the late Impressionist tradition behind and turned, as in *He and She*, to an expressive style of painting characterized by a free choice of colors. The work was created at a time when Jawlensky and Werefkin were part of the artists’ network Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), founded by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, which would go down in art history as a central pioneer of Modernism.