Sale: 392 / Modern Art, June 09. 2012 in Munich Lot 74

 
Lyonel Feininger - Fischer-Boote


74
Lyonel Feininger
Fischer-Boote, 1927.
Watercolor
Estimate:
€ 35,000 / $ 37,800
Sold:
€ 51,240 / $ 55,339

(incl. surcharge)
Fischer-Boote. 1927.
Watercolor and wash India ink drawing.
Signed lower left, titled lower center and dated lower right. On slightly gray-toned laid paper. 28,4 x 40,4 cm (11,1 x 15,9 in), size of sheet.

Accompanied by a photo expertise issued by Achim Moeller, New York, dated 7 December 2011. The work is registered in the archive of the Lyonel Feininger Project LLC, New York, under the number 1116-12-07-11.

PROVENANCE: Leona Elisabeth Prasse, Cleveland/USA.
Private collection Switzerland.

EXHIBITION: Lyonel Feininger. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Graphiken. Galerie Thomas, Munich, 17 June - 31 July, 1992, cat. no. 23 (with illu.)
Lyonel Feininger. Die Zeichnungen und Aquarelle. Kunsthalle Hamburg, Kunsthalle, 1998 cat. no. 96 (with illu. p. 129).

Lyonel Feininger was born on 17 July 1871 as the son of a concert violinist of German origin and a singer and pianist. He followed his parents to Europe in 1887, where he first attended the drawing and painting class at the Gewerbeschule in Hamburg and later studied at the Königliche Kunst-Akademie in Berlin from 1888 to 1892. Then followed one year in Paris where he attended the private art school of the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi. Feininger returned to Berlin in 1893, where he earned a living mainly as an illustrator until 1906. He spent the following two years in Paris where he met the 'Café du Dôme'-circle of German Matisse pupils as well as Robert Delaunay. He became a member of the 'Berliner Sezession' in 1909, exhibiting at their show for the first time one year later. The artist traveled to Paris in 1911 for his exhibition at the 'Salon des Independants'. Here he had his first encounter with Cubism. His acquaintance with Alfred Kubin and the 'Brücke' painters Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel opened up new perspectives for his own work in 1912. He began making his first architectural compositions with the typical Cubist fragmentation. In 1913 Franz Mark invited Feininger to participate in the 'Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon' at Herwarth Walden's 'Sturm'-Galerie in Berlin, which also organised Feininger's first one-man exhibition in 1917. Walter Gropius called him to the 'Bauhaus' in Weimar in 1919, where he taught graphic art and painting until 1926. Together with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexej von Jawlensky Feininger founded the artist group 'Die Blauen Vier' in 1924.

"Where I used to strive for motion and unrest, I have now tried to feel and express the objects‘ absolute calmness. A world as remote from reality as possible!!..", no one can describe the change in the artist’s creation better than the Feininger can with this quote. The years, or rather the summers at the Baltic Sea, were used to examine fundamental questions of art. The sea landscape s made around this time convey a feeling of order, however, without taking away the objects immanent magic. The silence these works emanate immediately goes over to the observer. With these subjects Feininger created a topos that was unique in these days. Since German Romanticism, particularly since Caspar David Friedrich no one had attained this aim, not even talking about reaching it. (Transl. Of quote after: Catalog Lyonel Feininger. Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne 1989, p. 40).

A first comprehensive retrospective exhibition took place in 1931 at the Kronprinzen-Palais in Berlin, where the artist moved in 1933. Feininger emigrated to New York in 1937. In the same year the National Socialists confiscated more than 400 of his works. Feininger's artistic breakthrough in the US only came in 1944 with a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1945 Feininger ran a summer course at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he met Gropius and Einstein. His teaching, his writing and his later watercolors were an important source for the development of Abstract Expressionism in America. [KD].




74
Lyonel Feininger
Fischer-Boote, 1927.
Watercolor
Estimate:
€ 35,000 / $ 37,800
Sold:
€ 51,240 / $ 55,339

(incl. surcharge)