The first version of “The Red Streetsweeper” was created in 1920, shortly after Walter Gropius had invited Feininger to join the Bauhaus. It is one of his early street scenes, which enjoyed great acclaim even at the time of their creation and, with their narrative subjects and distinctive characters, remain among the painter’s most accomplished works to this day. Drawings provide proof that Feininger depicted a street in Paris, which he first captured in pencil on paper in Montmartre in 1911. At the time, he was in France to participate in the “Salon des Indépendants,” where he encountered the works of the Cubists and Robert Delaunay, influences with a lasting impact on his art. Feininger first incorporated the striking figures surrounding the street sweeper—a character he must also have encountered in the French capital—into the street scene in a watercolor from 1915. In 1920, the motif was finally rendered in the painting “The Red Streetsweeper,” which, with its geometric stylization, partly luminous colors, and cartoon-like figures, reveals Parisian influences not only in its subject matter but also in its style. Above all, however, it embodies the unique magic of Lyonel Feininger’s street scenes, through which the painter creates a world between reality and dreams. This narrative world remains, nonetheless, unreal.

In 1937, when the German-American artist finally returned to the United States due to increasingly severe harassment by the National Socialists, most of his works remained in Germany. This was not the case with “The Red Streetsweeper,” which he took with him to the United States. It seems all the more tragic that the work, which had been saved from the turmoil of war, was destroyed in a warehouse fire in Montana along with other paintings in 1946. Just three years later, Feininger finally produced the present replica, a copy of the 1920 version, created from a photograph and his memory. A black-and-white photograph of the first painting is preserved in the collection of the Busch-Reisinger Museum (object no. BRLF.676.68.2). Today, we can only guess at the motivation behind the recreation of “The Red Streetsweeper,” but a look at the artist’s biography may offer a clue: in 1949, Feininger visited his old friend, the former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, who had emigrated to the United States in 1937. Although no details of this meeting are known, the exchange with Walter Gropius could well have been a catalyst for the artist’s artistic return to the happier days at the Bauhaus. [AR]