Lyonel Feininger

Galerie Melki, Paris
Robert Elkon Gallery, New York
Mrs. Albert List, Byram, Connecticut
Curt Valentin Gallery, New York
Galerie Beyeler, Basel (acquired from the above in 1971)
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1974)

New York, Curt Valentin Gallery, Lyonel Feininger Recent Paintings and Watercolors (1951-1954), 1954, no. 20, illustrated in the catalogue

Hans Hess, Lyonel Feininger, New York, 1959, no. 536, illustrated p. 300

This work is in excellent condition. Canvas is not lined. There is some very minor buckling at the upper corners. A pindot nick to the surface at extreme lower left corner and a few dots of surface dirt near that corner. There is also a pindot loss just below the center of the right edge. Under UV light no inpainting is apparent.
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.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE 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 artist, and by 1940 the towering buildings, fragmented and interpenetrated, had found their way into his art.

By the 1950s Feininger was almost exclusively interested in the interaction of line, form and color, and his art is as much about rendering a vision of the geometry inherent in nature as any one subject, though distinctive images of sailboats figure prominently in his work from this period. As Feininger wrote to his son Lux in September 1955: "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).