Lyonel Feininger

FIG.1 Lyonel Feininger, Diabolo Players I, 1909, oil on canvas, Private Collection (sold: Sotheby's, London, 3 February 2004, lot 12)

Sale of sixteen drawings from the collection of Achim Moeller to benefit the Lyonel Feininger Catalogue Raisonné Project

This group of sixteen drawings and watercolours by Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) extends chronologically over the artist's entire career as a painter, from 1907 until 1953, three years before his death. Included are seven early colour crayon and pencil sketches that Feininger referred to as his Natur-Notizen, or notes from nature (nos. 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9); two early figurative colour crayon drawings (nos. 3, 4); one ink drawing in a cubist style dating to 1916 (no. 10); two related charcoal drawings (nos. 11, 12) executed in 1916 and 1917, one of them finished in watercolour and ink; and four watercolours from the Bauhaus and later Berlin and New York periods (nos. 13, 14, 15, 16).

The earliest of the drawings were made when Feininger was known primarily as a caricaturist and illustrator. Highly regarded for his contributions to the German periodicals Ulk, Lustige Blätter, and Sporthumor, he received commissions after 1906 from the French journal Le Témoin and the American Chicago Sunday Tribune. In 1907, with the financial security provided by his widely successful comic-strip series The Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie's World, Feininger decided to embark on a career as a serious painter.

The Natur-Notizen, which Feininger jotted down in the small sketchbook that he carried about with him, were an integral part of his creative process, allowing him to "draw quite spontaneously whatever interests me," as he wrote in a letter to his friend the artist Alfred Kubin in January 1913.  It is significant that Feininger kept these drawings, carefully preserving them to serve as his artistic "capital". Several images and compositions that make their appearance on these sheets Feininger would explore in his later work.  "Sometimes years later," he wrote, "there may be a painting which for me represents reality as I experienced it" (June L. Ness, ed., Lyonel Feininger, New York and Washington, D.C., 1974: 37).  One such example is the early figurative painting Diabolo Players I, 1909, which is based on the sketch of a girl balancing a diabolo ball on a string (no. 1, recto) made during one of Feininger's visits to the Jardins du Luxembourg in Paris. 

As part of the process of incorporating a Natur-Notiz into a painting, Feininger would arrange selected motifs to form a compositional drawing in which, using ink and crayon, he also explored effects of color and chiaroscuro. Steam Train and Promenade (nos. 3, 4) are two rare examples. After Feininger's move from Paris to Berlin in 1908, his Natur-Notizen focus less on narrative and more on formal observation. The drawing dated 23rd August 1913, of the church of Gelmeroda near Weimar (no. 9), one of the artist's most frequent motifs, is clearly a study for the painting Gelmeroda II, executed the same year. No other preliminary drawing for this work is known.

Another theme that Feininger turned to was that of Bathers. The artist first depicted bathers strolling along the beach in his Natur-Notizen and shortly thereafter made this motif the subject of several paintings (figs.3-5). Exploring elements of cubism and problems of form, Feininger also examined the theme in other media, a striking example of which is the ink drawing of 1916 (no.10).

Feininger first used the motif of Hohe Häuser, or high houses, in a painting dating from 1912.  A second version was realized in 1913. In two related drawings, Hohe Häuser III, 1916 (no. 11), and Hohe Häuser V, 1917 (no. 12), he revisited the theme in charcoal, a medium he began to use in 1912 to explore light, volume, and colour. To underline their importance, the artist not only signed, dated and titled these charcoal drawings but also framed them with an ink border, as he did in his watercolours. 

Ten drawings in this selection were originally in the collection of Alois Jakob Schardt (1889 -1955), a close friend and promoter of the artist.  Schardt was the influential director of the Museum für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe, Moritzburg, Halle, before he served in 1933 for four months as the director of the Nationalgalerie, Berlin. In 1939, he emigrated to the United States, where he taught aesthetics at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

The sale of the sixteen drawings will benefit the Lyonel Feininger Catalogue Raisonné Project, initiated in the late 1980s by the dealer and art historian Achim Moeller. The Lyonel Feininger Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Volume I (1907-1918), compiled and annotated by Mr. Moeller, is planned for publication in the autumn of 2006 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the artist's death. The publication will coincide with an exhibition at the Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, Germany.  The second and third volumes, which cover the years 1919-1937 and 1938-1956, are planned for publication in 2008 and 2010, respectively.

Achim Moeller is grateful to the Feininger family for their continuing interest in and for their scholarly support of the catalogue raisonné and other related research projects.