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Am Quai (Marine)
Angler und Kanalboot
Barke auf See
Off the Coast (Vor der Küste)
Dorf in Sachsen – Weimar
Treptow on the Rega

Lyonel Feininger

Am Quai (Marine)

1918

6 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches (16,7 x 21 cm)


Lyonel Feininger

Angler und Kanalboot

1920

5 3/4 x 6 1/2 inches (14,5 x 16,5 cm)


Lyonel Feininger

Barke auf See

1918

7 x 8 5/8 inches (17,7 x 21,9 cm)


Lyonel Feininger

Off the Coast (Vor der Küste)

1951
Lithograph on wove paper
9 x 13 1/2 inches (22,7 x 34,3 cm)


Lyonel Feininger

Dorf in Sachsen – Weimar

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


Our woodcut is extremely rare and has a unique character. There is no edition, according to Prasse, there are only a few test prints on different papers, of which the only known copy is in the Weimar Art Collections.


The villages in the area, well over a hundred, are magnificent! The architecture (you know how I feel about it!) is just right for me, so stimulating, so incredibly monumental at times! [...]", Feininger writes. In this sense, the artist traveled through Thuringia and the Weimar area during the late 1910s and was likely fascinated by a village whose houses and architecture he captured.

Stylistically and compositionally related to the woodcut "Mellingen" from the same year, Feininger shows a view of a nested structure of houses with black highlighted window openings. The architecture is typically broken down into cubist pieces by Feininger. The medium of the woodcut, which he loved allowed him to reduce the seen motive to the most basic, to pure geometric forms and lines, rather than to accurately reproduce the natural model.

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.