Lyonel Feininger and the 'Steinbrücke' in Oberweimar
In February 1906, Lyonel Feininger traveled to Weimar for the first time. He visited Julia Berg, for whom he would soon leave his first wife, the pianist Clara Fürst. Julia Berg attended university in Weimar, and on strolls through the city of Classicism, she discovered a historic building that would inspire Lyonel Feininger to create several works. After her arrival, she must have written to him about the impressive architecture of the massive stone bridge crossing the Ilm river in Weimar because on January 17, 1906, Lyonel Feininger replied: "[..] I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to seeing the bridge [..]" (quoted from: Roland März (ed.), Lyonel Feininger. Von Gelmeroda nach Manhattan, Berlin 1998, p. 60). A month later, when Lyonel Feininger finally came to Weimar to see the bridge with his own eyes, his anticipation would not be disappointed, as further letters and, ultimately, this work reveal.

As was so often the case, Lyonel Feininger was instantly captivated by the bridge and revisited the motif even years later. In addition to many drawings, he also created several paintings depicting the bridge, exploring the motif in various variations and repeatedly pushing his creative boundaries. The first painting from 1912 is titled "Brücke 0" and still bears Lyonel Feininger's figurative style from his early days as a painter. Yet the first tendencies towards exploring Cubism can already be seen here. During a trip to Paris in 1911, Lyonel Feininger first came into contact with Cubism through works by Robert Delaunay – impressions that were to have a lasting influence on his style in the years that followed, as this first depiction of the bridge suggests.

Two other paintings in which he examined the bridge in Weimar followed as early as 1913: "Brücke I" and the present "Auf der Brücke." Although the two works show the structure from different perspectives, they resemble each other in the choice of cool colors, a higher degree of abstraction, and a growing use of reduced geometric forms. They were created during another several-month stay in Weimar. In the meantime, Julia and Lyonel had married and were living in Berlin with their three sons, Andreas, Laurence, and Theodore. For the artist, this period in Weimar around 1913 was a phase of artistic freedom and creative renewal that ultimately ushered in an essential change in his artistic style.


"Auf der Brücke" symbolizing a stylistic change around 1913
Under the impression of his stay in Paris and the growing popularity of Cubism he witnessed there, Feininger gradually abandoned his figurative compositions, which still showed traces of his background in caricature. In a letter to Julia in April 1913, he noted, "I am beginning to work well and happily; what I do comes naturally and is no longer a problem. I don't want to reveal a single word about it, only that I am improving daily, becoming clearer, and finding myself. I am happy when I step out of the house into the open air; there is no loneliness for me here!" (Lyonel Feininger in a letter to Julia Feininger, Weimar, April 7, 1913) Although Cubism influenced him, he did not wholly devote himself to this strange style. However, as was so characteristic of his artistic development, he found a way to continue shaping his artistic aspirations regardless of external impulses.

Admittedly, Feininger's characteristic figures still occupy the center of "Auf der Brücke." However, dressed in the tall hats and long, jagged coats that were so typical of Feininger, they, too, reveal a progressive, formal reduction. As anonymous figures with rather gloomy, mystical overtones, they increasingly cede the stage to the architecture and the natural spectacle. They maintain a balance between the formal, geometric austerity of the composition and a suggested poetic narrative thread reminiscent of the novels of Victor Hugo or Honoré de Balzac, which Feininger was enthusiastic about at the time.

As such, the work "Auf der Brücke" not only represents a transfer between the two banks of the Ilm in Weimar in terms of motif but can also be understood as a symbolic transition from Feininger's figurative style to his geometric-cubist works and the pioneering crystalline-prismatic works that would ultimately emerge from them. That same year, Feininger began the famous cycle of paintings "Gelmeroda I-III," which belongs to the group of famous depictions of architecture, marking a further step in developing the artist's work. In the fall of 1913, he followed an invitation from Franz Marc to take part in Herwarth Walden's "Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon" (First German Autumn Salon), which showcased the avant-garde of the time in a group exhibition. Walden's gallery "Der Sturm" would eventually host Lyonel Feininger's first solo exhibition in 1917.

Consequently, "Auf der Brücke" is, both stylistically and in terms of public perception, exemplary of a leap in the artist's evolution, which he referred to in a letter to Julia dated May 18, 1913, as "[..] the first mature period in my artistic existence" (Lyonel Feininger in a letter to Julia Feininger, Weimar, May 18, 1913). In recent years, the work has received increased attention through several group exhibitions, and it was shown in, among others, the highly acclaimed retrospective of Lyonel Feininger's work at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main. This was a long overdue appreciation of a body of work that is so meaningful for Lyonel Feininger's development on his way to becoming one of the most important artists of Modern Art. Alfred Hentzen once described Feininger's outstanding lifetime achievement with the beautiful words: "Feininger's work miraculously unites strict, crystalline clarity with pure, romantic poetry" (Alfred Hentzen, quoted from the preface of the exhibition catalog for the memorial exhibition in Hamburg/Essen/Baden-Baden in 1961, preface).
[AR]