A few years after he had returned to the USA, Lyonel Feininger began working on a new motif group, the so-called “Ghosties”. Works from this phase are among the most intimate and most personal in the artist’s oeuvre. They consist almost exclusively of watercolors and drawings created by Feininger between the late 1940s and the end of his life in 1956. Primarily used as personal gifts and greeting cards for family and friends, they depict small figures, fleeting characters with extremely idiosyncratic expressions and humorous, exaggerated features.

The present work, “Figures in Red, Blue, White, and Yellow” from 1955/56, which comes from the estate of T. Lux Feininger, one of the artist’s sons, is the only known painting from the highly personal subject group in which Lyonel Feininger’s “ghosties” are the sole protagonists. In small format, the contours of a small group of figures emerge from a light green mist of color, some of which are only hinted at in the form of a cloud of color, while others are divided into geometric fields by dark lines. Their contours appear as if they were clad in long coats; some wear some kind of hat, and some have been given an almost human face with eyes and noses. Although the figures do not seem to interact with one another, they still appear to be involved in joint activities that follow the imaginary rules of their own small, colorful cosmos. They look like little crooks or a secret gathering of friends hiding from prying eyes in the mist of color in their bright coats. Or, as Ernst Scheyer once so aptly described it: "The prankish but benign goblins do not seem to be fully corporealized; they give the impression that they will disappear before one's eyes before they have ever fully existed." (Ernst Scheyer, Lyonel Feininger - caricature & fantasy, Detroit 1964, p. 148)

Apart from the imaginative narrative touch inherent in Lyonel Feininger's Ghostie depictions, the painting “Figures in Red, Blue, White, and Yellow” also has special stylistic significance, as it combines the characteristic features of his late work with a remarkable stylistic return to his early days as a caricaturist. His almost abstract dissolution of the motif into cloudy nebulae of color, which he developed late in life in America and which are sometimes characterized by a lyrical -mystical aura, is ingeniously combined in the present work with Lyonel Feininger's wit, revealing a glimpse into the the former Bauhaus master's personality and humorous vein, which he kept until the end of his life. [AR]