Behind Jawlensky’s “Girl With The Green Face”
In my WRD103 and 104 courses this year we discussed Alexei Jawlensky’s 1910 painting, Girl With the Green Face as an exercise in textual and contextual analysis, with an eye toward meaning: what does it mean?
The painting seems particularly well suited for that kind of analysis and reflection: its subject is ambiguous (she is, in fact, a girl with a green face); Jawlensky isn’t the most well known of painters, making research that much more difficult; and the painting hangs here in Chicago, at the Art Institute, where, in Gallery 392 in the new Modern Wing, it is surrounded by much more well known artists and paintings.
We initially discussed methods of analysis and meaning-making and compared them to the ways we discuss textual artifacts:
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