'Just before the war I suffered a good deal of pain in my family life, and then the war came and we had to flee with everything we could carry to Switzerland, to a small village called Saint-Prex, on Lake Geneva near Morges. In our small apartment there, all I had to work in was a small room with a window. I wanted to go on painting my powerful pictures with their strong colours, but I felt I couldn'’t. My soul would not allow me to go on with this sensuous painting, although there was much beauty in my work. I felt that I had to find another language, a more spiritual language. That I felt in my soul. I sat at my window. In front of me I saw a path, a few trees, and from time to time, in the distance, a mountain.

'Then I began to seek a new path in art. It was hard work indeed. I knew that I must paint not what I saw, not even what I felt, but only what was in me, in my soul. Figuratively speaking, it was like this: in my heart I felt as if there were an organ, which I had to sound. And Nature, which I saw before me, only prompted me. And that was a key that unlocked this organ and made it sound. At first it was very difficult. But gradually I came to have no difficulty in finding through colour and form what was in my soul... I painted a great many pictures, which I called 'Variations on a Landscape Theme’.
'They are songs without words' (M. Jawlensky, L. Peroni-Jawlensky & A. Jawlensky, letter to Pater Willibrord Verkade, Wiesbaden, 12 June 1938, quoted in Alexej von Jawlensky: Catalogue Raisonnée of the Oil Paintings: Volume I 1890-1914, London, 1991, p. 34).