Some time after his return to the United States, Lyonel Feininger began working on a new series of motifs known as the “Ghosties” or “Männekens.” These are among the most intimate and personal works in his oeuvre and consist almost exclusively of watercolors and drawings, created from the late 1940s until the artist died in 1956. Most were used as private gifts or on greeting cards for family and friends, and depict small figures, fleeting characters with highly distinctive expressions and personalities, drawn with humorous, exaggerated features.

The work “Figures in Red, Blue, White, and Yellow” from 1955/56, from the estate of T. Lux Feininger, one of the artist’s sons, is the only known painting in this series in which the “Ghosties” act as the sole protagonists. Feininger allows a small group of figures to emerge from a mist of light green, with some of the beings suggested only as shadowy clouds of color, while others have been divided into geometric fields by dark lines. Their contours appear as if wrapped in long coats; some wear hats, and a few have almost human faces with eyes and noses. Although the figures do not interact with one another, they nevertheless seem to be involved in a shared narrative that follows the imaginary rules of their small, colorful world. They appear like little rogues or a conspiratorial gathering of friends who, wrapped in their colorful cloaks, hide from prying eyes within the mist of color. 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)

In addition to the imaginative, narrative quality that is always inherent in Lyonel Feininger’s depictions of ghosts, the painting “Figures in Red, Blue, White, and Yellow” also holds special stylistic significance, as it combines the characteristic features of his late work with a remarkable stylistic reference to Feininger’s early days as a caricaturist. The style he developed only late in life in America—with its typical, almost abstract dissolution of the motif into cloudy mists of color, sometimes imbued with a lyrical-mystical aura—enters here into a brilliant dialogue with the wit of his caricatures. Almost as incidentally, the small painting offers a glimpse into the subtle humor of the creator of these small, endearing figures—a sense of humor that Lyonel Feininger retained until the end of his life. [AR]