Lot 270 N

With the closing of the Bauhaus through the Nazis and his departure from Dessau in March of 1933, Lyonel Feininger was left without a home. A fair amount of time would pass before he moved to the United States; as a result, the artist initially found himself faced with a future defined by great uncertainty. It is hardly surprising that Feininger's personal situation in life within Nazi Germany is also conveyed by his works from these years. Up to his final departure from Germany, they are defined by a penetrating atmosphere of an intensity otherwise rarely achieved.
Like other pieces from that time, our landscape featuring a dramatically Expressionist backdrop of clouds above its low horizon also contains an unmistakable sense of introversion. The two figures at the beach seem abandoned - simultaneously lonely and filled with longing. Feininger has drawn them infinitesimally small under a massive sky, so that they immediately present themselves to viewers as a laconic commentary on concepts of the landscape among German Romanticists, such as Caspar David Friedrich. Formally our watercolour is distinguished by Feininger's masterful use of line, by means of which he successfully arranges the depicted space with just a few strokes. Not only several watercolours but also the 1941 painting “Grosse Wolke” (Hess 416) demonstrate how lastingly the compositional structure of the seascape and its weather would also occupy the artist in the years that followed.