Lyonel Feininger

Curt Valentin Gallery, New York
Joseph H. Hirshhorn, New York (acquired from the above in 1954)  
E. V. Thaw & Co., Inc., New York (sale: Parke-Bernet, New York, 27th March 1963, lot 48)
Mr & Mrs Arnold Askin, New York (purchased at the above sale) 
William Beadleston, Inc., New York
Acquired from the above by the late owner in June 1989

New York, Curt Valentin Gallery, Lyonel Feininger, Recent Paintings and Watercolours (1951-1954), 1954, no. 16
Waltham, Massachusetts, Brandeis University, 1956
London, William Beadleston, Inc. & New York, Coe Kerr Gallery, The Askin Collection: Paintings, sculpture, pastels and watercolours from the Estate of Mr and Mrs Arnold Askin, 1989

Hans Hess, Lyonel Feininger, New York, 1961, no. 528, illustrated p. 299

The canvas is not lined. There are three nailhead-sized spots of retouching and further pinhead-sized spots in the upper centre of the composition. There are two further nailhead-sized spots of retouching towards the centre right. All retouching is visible under UV light. Apart from some light craquelure throughout the canvas and some minor paint shrinkage to the light brown area with associated retouching, visible under UV light, this work is in good condition.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

In the summer of 1936, an invitation from Mills College in Oakland provided Feininger with the welcome opportunity to escape Nazi Germany. From a letter he wrote in May 1937, it is clear that the possibility of living in America appealed to him on both an artistic and personal level; 'I feel twenty-five years younger knowing that I am going to a country where imagination in art and abstraction are not an utter crime, as they are here...' (quoted in Ulrich Luckhardt, Lyonel Feininger, Munich, 1989, p. 44). The architecture of New York did indeed provide a source of inspiration to the aging artist, and by 1940 the towering buildings, which in many ways provided a solid vision of his own art of the fragmentation and the interpenetration of forms, had found their way into his art.  

However, despite the stimulus of his new surroundings, it is evident that Feininger turned increasingly in on himself in the last decade of his life, relying of his early memories of Thuringian villages as his main pictorial source. By the 1950s, when the present work was painted, Feininger was primarily interested in the interaction of line, form and colour, and his art is as much about rendering a vision of the geometry inherent in nature as any one subject. As Feininger wrote to his son Lux in September 1955, four months before his death: 'I incline ever more to reduce my language in painting to the merest essences of line and colour; as a painter I am hopelessly bound even though I have an appreciation for the properties of pigments in using them in my own sparse way. I am nearing a stage where I am even commencing to annihilate precise form, in the interest – as it seems to me – of unity' (Ibid., p. 168). 

Fig.1 Feininger with his son T. Lux and his grandson Tomas at the Central Park Yacht Pond, 1951.