Lyonel Feininger - Geranium (Harlequin and Clown) - image-1

Lot 80 N

Lyonel Feininger - Geranium (Harlequin and Clown)

Auction 1155 - overview Cologne
19.06.2020, 18:00 - Modern and Contemporary Art - Evening Sale
Estimate: 70.000 € - 80.000 €

Lyonel Feininger

Geranium (Harlequin and Clown)
1908

India ink, pencil and coloured chalks on paper 26 x 21 cm Dated 'Tues AUG 11 08' in black India ink lower left and inscribed 'Heringsdorf' verso.

Over the course of 1908 Lyonel Feininger began work on his grotesque and mummers' play pictures, including paintings as important as “Karneval”, from the collection of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, or “Große Revolution (Uprising)”, now housed in New York's Museum of Modern Art. Feininger had just discovered painting for himself in the previous years, after long working primarily on paper. Our work was evidently created at the beginning of this phase in his work, in Heringsdorf on Usedom, where Lyonel Feininger stayed in the summer of 1908.
The present work impressively demonstrates the graphic mastery which the artist had already achieved in those early years. Feininger had long possessed a keen eye for detail but, above all, he had a precise feel for the comedy and tragedy of human existence as well as a fine sense for the perplexities of his time. The scene between the clown, Harlequin and the geranium plant appears absurd to anarchical in its distorted proportions, while the hills and trees in the background have been set into a ghostlike motion. In spite of the confusion: faced with the social and cultural upheaval of his epoch, Feininger has presented us with a hopeful and longing look into a fantastic world between the circus and the dream.

Certificate

Achim Moeller, Director of the Lyonel Feininger Project LLC, New York – Berlin, has confirmed the authenticity of this work with a photo-certificate dated 15 December 1997. It is registered in the archive of the Lyonel Feininger Project under the number 12-15-97-165.
With a photo-certificate by Ulrich Luckhardt, Hamburg, dated 15 February 1999.

Provenance

Achim Moeller Fine Art, New York; Private collection, Switzerland

Exhibitions

Cologne 1997 (Galerie Gmurzynska), Lyonel Feininger, p. 24 with full-page colour illus. p. 25