Lot 269 N

Influenced by the increasing oppression through the Nazis and developments antagonistic to art, Lyonel Feininger returned to his native America in 1937, after almost 50 years in Germany. During the first year and a half he created no paintings and only a few works on paper, which include the cityscape with buildings offered here.
A crooked ensemble of buildings in a sloping street presents itself to us in a multifocal view and as a directly animate pictorial object. Feininger's breathing life into depicted objects was the result of his early work as a caricaturist with various magazines and papers, such as “Ulk”, “Lustige Blätter” and the “Chicago Sunday Tribune” - just as he also developed a regular group of characters who would henceforth inhabit his compositions, for example, the “woman with red hair” or the “tall man with a top hat”. The latter resulted from Feininger's love of French classics, such as Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac.
The tall man with the top hat was part of Feininger's fixed canon of figures, although here he appears a bit tattered in his role as a street sweeper. In the general tone established solely through shades of green, the otherwise so proud figure stands in a hunched posture with a somewhat battered top hat. To some extent the scene can be seen as a slightly melancholy commentary on the situation in Feininger's own life. In a grand and lyrical gesture, the figure sweeps together something blue: presumably one of the clouds hung at the top (as though out to dry) has just plunged from the sky.
Evidently Feininger personally greatly cherished this sheet: he reserved it for his own collection, using an “XX” to indicate that it was not for sale.