Works by Russian artist Marianne Werefkin (1860-1938) are being shown at the Musée-galerie de la Seita in Paris until June 25th 2000. Marianne Werefkin, an artist endowed with a strong personality, contributed to the promotion of the avant-garde movement in her country. She first received a French education and studied under Ilia Repin, the master of social-realism, in the 1880s. She then met Alexej Jawlensky in 1891 with whom she lived a passionate and orageous existence.
The couple settled in Munich where Werefkin did not pay during many years but transformed her apartment in a kind of social salon where many intellectuals met and discussed new trends.
She wrote her personal diary, «letters to an unknown person» between 1901 and 1906, and resumed painting working in a style close to that of Symbolist painters.
Werefkin asserted the principle of art seen as a kind of expression of one's soul or of the internal world.
While resuming painting in 1907 she worked under the influence of the Pont-Aven movement, the Nabi school and the new German Expressionist group, showing much audacity in her works. She painted rather tormented scenes with processions of figures in black walking on sinuous roads, which earned her a solid reputation though she remained much in the shadow of Jawlensky.
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