Alexej von Jawlensky

According to Wikipedia he spent the rest of his life painting heads — hundreds of them, getting simpler and simpler until they were barely faces at all. This one's from near the start of all that.

He spent the last stretch of his career painting the same face over and over — hundreds of versions, from what I've read, each one flatter and more stripped back than the one before it.

They say a small crowd of painters kept going back to the same Bavarian village around then — Kandinsky among them — daring each other to push the colours further every summer. This is what that dare looked like.