In its careful balance of medievalism and modernism, Lyonel Feininger’s Windmühle in Werder powerfully captures the spirit of Walter Gropius’s 1919 Bauhaus manifesto and it’s call for a new attitude and approach to art-making in the twentieth century. Modelled on a romanticised medieval vision of a community of guildsmen, this new school aimed to dissolve the arbitrary divisions between craft and the fine arts, taking architecture as its leading principle. With his preferred subjects of quiet houses, bridges, cathedrals and mills, Feininger’s work seems immediately well-suited to the Bauhaus School’s mission statement that ‘the ultimate goal of all art is building!’. Taking cues from the simplified geometric treatment of the landscape evident in a painting like Picasso’s Le réservoir, Horta de Ebro (fig. 1), Feininger’s Cubistic modelling of space and form fully exemplified what Gropius described as the ideal ‘architectonic spirit’ in art.

Appropriately, not only did Gropius invite Feininger to join the Bauhaus faculty as Formmeister in 1919, he also used Feininger’s striking woodcut, Kathedrale, on the opening pages of the manifesto (fig. 2). Dominated by the vertical thrust of three, towering Gothic spires, Feininger’s woodcut visually evoked the utopian synthesis of architecture, painting and sculpture into one, crystalline form. Like the cathedral, Feininger’s titular windmill rushes upwards, towering steeply above the fractured buildings and rooftops of the town, its right-angled sails drawing the eye into the centre of the composition. Set in the side of a steep triangular shard of luminous green, Feininger’s characteristically opalescent palette is used to full effect here, the darker tessellating forms of the windmill standing out sculptural and solid against the glowing grey sky. Far from static, the windmill seems to be charged with kinetic energy, its sails carving firmly through the sky above the town, emphasised by Feininger’s dynamic and confident use of intersecting force lines and clearly demonstrating the profound influence of Futurism on his work. The effect is prismatic, as both the buildings and the space around them crystalise into interlocking planes of iridescent green, yellow, blue and grey, brought into even sharper relief by their juxtaposition with the painting’s warmer, terracotta tones.

In its steep compositional arrangement and splintering of space and form into brilliant, geometric shards, Windmühle in Werder recalls Robert Delaunay’s masterful exploration of Cubist fragmentation in his Eiffel Tower series from 1911 (fig. 4). The same year, Feininger had made an important trip to Paris where he was exposed to the currents of Cubism and Orphism - the term given by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire to describe Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s attempts to fuse sensation and colour within a Cubistic approach to structure. Although these influences would not surface immediately in Feininger’s painting, Apollinaire’s description of Orphic art as offering 'simultaneously pure aesthetic pleasure, a clearly perceptible construction, and a meaning, the subject, which is sublime' seems well-suited to Feininger’s artistic project by the early 1920s (Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, Berkley, 2004, p. 26). However, while Delaunay chose the preeminent architectural symbol of European modernity as the subject of several of his thoroughly modernist canvases, Feininger turned instead to a symbol of Germany’s past. Feininger visited Werder, which is located on the river Havel, just south-east of Berlin, on 26th April 1912 with his wife and the artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff hoping to see the cherry blossom. The present work is based on a charcoal drawing from 6th June 1912, and the Werder windmill also appears in a woodcut from 1918 and the painting Mühle im Frühling (Mill in Spring) from 1935.

During this period, Feininger also returned to his musical roots, composing a series of fugues whose polyphonic structures directly informed his thinking about painting in the 1920s. Alongside his fellow Bauhaus tutors Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, Feininger found increasingly that in its emotional expressivity and structural complexity music opened up alternative routes into painting. As Barbara Haskell has described, with its layering of voices and harmonious patterns of repetition and variation, polyphonic counterpoint in particular offered Feininger a way of moving beyond the purely prismatic, towards a chromatic equivalent of the monumentality and lucidity that he found in Bach’s ‘architectonic’ compositions. Windmühle in Werder is a rare example of Feininger’s painting from the early 1920s when his 'successful adaptation of multipart musical harmonies led to crystalline works that seemed illuminated by an inner radiance and infused with air' (Barbara Haskell (ed.), Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World, New York, 2011, p. 99).