Feininger – a Bauhaus master in the shadow of political upheaval
The Bauhaus years marked a decisive phase of artistic reorientation for Lyonel Feininger. Appointed by Walter Gropius as one of the first masters at the State Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, Feininger took over the directorship of the graphic workshops; his woodcut title for the Bauhaus Manifesto remains iconic to this day. Even after the school relocated to Dessau in 1925, he maintained his connection to the institution. He lived with his wife Julia in the master house that Gropius had designed, but increasingly withdrew from his teaching duties to devote himself to painting.
His years in Dessau yielded major works such as “Vogelwolke” (Bird Cloud, 1926) and “Gelmeroda XII” (1929)—crystalline architectural landscapes with faceted surfaces that unfold an incomparable synthesis of abstraction and reality. But the year 1933 marked a turning point. With the National Socialists' seizure of political power, pressure on the Bauhaus and its members increased. After the school closed in 1932, Lyonel and Julia Feininger left Dessau in March 1933 and moved to Berlin. Under the repressive regime of the new rulers, artistic work became increasingly impossible; Feininger, an American citizen since birth, finally returned to the United States in 1937.

From Woodcut to Painting
During this transitional period, a time between departure and new beginnings, Feininger created works of a particularly distinctive character, including the present “Marine nach Holzschnitt” (Seascape after Woodcut)—the painting ties in directly with Feininger's intensive exploration of printmaking after World War I. Between 1918 and 1920, he produced over 150 woodcuts, cementing his status as one of the most influential figures in modern printmaking. From an early stage, he tried his hand at transferring the specific style of woodcuts—their rigid linearity, sharply delineated fields of color and form—into painting. Works such as "The Privateers" (1920) and "Marin" (1924, Centre Pompidou, Paris) bear witness to these efforts.

With “Marine nach Holzschnitt” from 1933, Feininger explicitly returned to his graphic template. The composition is based on the woodcut “Ships and Sun 3” from 1918 (Prasse W 69), which he even used as letterhead in his correspondence with Galka Scheyer. In the painting, however, he lends the motif a new radiance: a sailing ship with furled sails and a dinghy lie almost statically in the center of the picture, surrounded by block-like areas in deep dark blue and bright orange. While the woodcut is rendered in black and white and receives its color from the yellowish paper it is printed on, Feininger transforms the graphic principle into a color-intensive pictorial structure that lends the seemingly simple motif an unexpected expressiveness.

Poetic pictorial visions in the face of crisis
Hans Hess, was one of the first major interpreters of Feininger's work, sees these paintings from the early 1930s as an artistic response to the oppressive political climate of the time. In his 1959 monograph, he writes: “In these works, the object—a toy boat on a fairy-tale lake—is viewed as an unknown entity. The reality of the object in its solitude is simultaneously negated; the ship was only a toy, the whole thing a dream, full of childlike magic.” Hess thus interprets the work as a reflection between memory and transcendence—between the harsh realities of time and an inner world of poetic visions. Feininger's marine woodcut is a work on the threshold. The bright, almost spherical sunlight announces a departure into the unknown—an imagery that will become reality for the artist with his emigration to the USA in 1937. Despite his origins in the country, he had to assert himself in his old and new home. However, thanks to his close relationship with Galka Scheyer and her promotional activities for the “Blue Four,” he was able to build on his earlier exhibition success quickly.

Bridge between the worlds
The fact that “Marine nach Holzschnitt” never left the artist's family emphasizes its exceptional position within his oeuvre. It is not only a testament to Feininger's inexhaustible inventiveness in his use of different techniques, but also a painterly bridge between two worlds: between the years at the Bauhaus and the new beginning in the United States, between graphic austerity and colorful vibrancy, between biographical crisis and artistic self-assertion.
As a painted woodcut, the work exemplifies Feininger's central themes: his fascination with ships and seafaring, which, throughout his life, he understood as symbols of movement, departure, and freedom; the transformation of printmaking principles into painting; and, last but not least, the ability to find a visual language of luminous, almost dreamlike intensity in a time of deepest political darkness. In 1941, he revisited the motif in the painting “Peaceful Navigation” (Moeller 432, Hess).
With poetic power, “Marine nach Holzschnitt” combines phases of retrospection and new beginnings in Lyonel Feininger's favorite ship motif. [EH]