By 1934, arthritis had locked Jawlensky's fingers and elbows. He clamped the brush between both hands, arms outstretched, and painted roughly a thousand small canvases he called Meditations. They are among the most concentrated devotional images in modern art, produced by a man who could barely move.

Jawlensky was born in Torzhok, Russia, in 1864, the fifth child of a military family. He trained as an officer in the Imperial Guard before abandoning that career in 1889 to study painting under Ilya Repin in St Petersburg. His patron and companion Marianne von Werefkin, herself a successful painter, financed their move to Munich in 1896. There he met Kandinsky, beginning a friendship that would shape both their careers.

Matisse, Van Gogh and Gauguin all pushed Jawlensky toward bolder colour, but his real catalyst was a trip to Provence in 1905 that convinced him colour could carry spiritual weight without representational accuracy. Back in Munich he produced intense, mask-like portraits: the Mystical Heads (1917 to 1919) and Saviour's Faces (1918 to 1920) drew directly on Russian Orthodox icon traditions from his childhood. He studied theosophy, yoga and Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, seeking a synthesis of Eastern and Western spiritual practice through paint.

He co-founded the New Munich Artists' Association with Kandinsky and later joined Der Blaue Reiter. In 1924, Emmy Scheyer (whom Jawlensky nicknamed "Galka", Russian for jackdaw) abandoned her own painting career to promote his work in America, forming Die Blaue Vier with Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Klee and Feininger. The First World War had already forced Jawlensky from Germany to Switzerland; he returned to Wiesbaden in 1921 and stayed until his death in 1941, increasingly isolated as the Nazis classified his work as degenerate.