kachel-1 kachel-1 kachel-1 kachel-1 kachel-1 kachel-1 kachel-1 kachel-1
Brautschau
Dorf in Sachsen – Weimar
Schiffe am Hafenquai
Alte Seebären (Old shellbacks)
Auf dem Ausguck (On the Lookout)
Merry Christmas (Three Figures)
Teltow, 1
Treptow on the Rega

Lyonel Feininger

Brautschau

1955

7 1/4 x 8 1/2 inches (18,3 x 21,7 cm)


Lyonel Feininger

Dorf in Sachsen – Weimar

1918
Woodcut on firm wove paper
7 x 8 5/8 inches (17,4 x 22 cm)


Lyonel Feininger

Schiffe am Hafenquai

1918

6 3/4 x 10 inches (17,1 x 25 cm)


Lyonel Feininger

Alte Seebären (Old shellbacks)

1918
Woodcut on Japan paper
5 1/8 x 7 3/8 inches (12,8 x 18,6 cm)


Lyonel Feininger

Auf dem Ausguck (On the Lookout)

1918
Woodcut on Japan paper
6 x 9 1/8 inches (14,9 x 22,9 cm)


Lyonel Feininger

Merry Christmas (Three Figures)


Watercolor, ink and gold colour on wove paper
2 1/2 x 4 1/8 inches (6,4 x 10,2 cm)


Lyonel Feininger

Teltow, 1

1914
Etching on wove paper
7 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches (17,9 x 23,6 cm)


The printing plate was brought to Paris in the early 1950s, where it was cleaned of any signs of oxidation. Subsequently, a small edition of 25 copies was printed for the artist, which also includes our perfectly preserved sheet.

The etching is a reinterpretation of the unfortunately lost version in oil from 1912: "I commenced an etching last night [...] of the church of Teltow after the same composition as the oil [...]." (See WVZ).
The technique of etching presents the artist with a very special challenge. With “Teltow, 1” he achieved a masterpiece. In contrast to drawings and woodcuts, his etching is filigree, rich in nuances, full of transparency and flooded with light. Here, too, reality is distorted in favor of expressive expression. The artist himself makes clear how novel and significant Feininger's work is: “I have finished the etching of Teltow church, have washed it off and it looks promising. I think I have started on a new line of works with this one, no amalgamation, pure graphic without picturesque addition [...] ".

Lyonel Feininger

Treptow on the Rega

1925
Pencil on wove paper (perforated at the upper margin and pierced by the artist)
8 1/8 x 5 1/2 inches (20,5 x 14,1 cm)


Our drawing was made in 1925, the year the Bauhaus in Weimar was closed. As in the previous year, Feininger spent this summer in Deep, which lies at the mouth of the Rega River in Pomerania on the Baltic Sea. He visited the nearby towns of Cammin, Greifenberg, Kolberg and "Treptow", among others.
Once again, this drawing shows how rich and artistically valuable Feininger's "nature notes" are. As a kind of affair of the artist's heart, they have fundamental significance for his oeuvre.

Über Lyonel Feininger

Born: 1871 in New York
Died: 1956 in New York

Lyonel Feininger was born in New York on 17 July 1871, the son of a concert violinist and a singer and pianist. In 1887, at the age of 16, he accompanied his parents on a concert tour to Europe. With his parents' permission, the young Feininger first attended drawing and painting classes at the Gewerbeschule in Hamburg. A year later he passed the entrance examination to the Königliche Kunst-Akademie in Berlin, where he studied from 1888 to 1892. In Berlin Feininger began working for newspapers and publishers early on, and the demand for his illustrations and caricatures was enormous. From 1905 onwards, Feininger increasingly devoted himself to printmaking methods, although the majority of his outstanding woodcuts were only produced between 1918-20, for which he is still celebrated today as the most important woodcutter of the 20th century. In 1907 he made his first attempts at oil painting, which initially still had a distinctly Impressionist-Naturalist tinge. Feininger's path from sought-after caricaturist to artist was a constant experimentation with a wide variety of techniques and artistic means of expression and was only to be steered in a groundbreaking direction for him by a Cubist experience in Paris in 1911: Impressions of nature had to be "inwardly transformed and crystallised [!]", he stated in a letter to his second wife Julia as early as 1907 - an attitude that would later lead to geometrically reduced imagery. And it ushered in a decisive artistic chapter for which the artist is still admired today: to make the world crystalline. In 1917, his first solo exhibition took place in the Berlin gallery "Der Sturm", and two years later he was one of the first masters Walter Gropius appointed to the Bauhaus in 1919. In the same year, as a master for the graphic workshop, Feininger produced his famous title woodcut "Cathedral" for the "Bauhaus Manifesto". From 1926 to 1933, Feininger lived in Dessau. After the Bauhaus relocation, he was still a master craftsman, but without teaching duties. In 1926 he forms the group "The Blue Four" with Klee, Kandinsky and Jawlensky. In 1929-31 he produced the iconic Halle pictures. In 1937 Feininger leaves Germany and returns to the country of his birth. About 400 of his works are confiscated by the National Socialists as "degenerate". In 1947 Feininger became president of the Federation of American Painters and Sculptors. Lyonel Feininger died in New York City on 13 January 1956.