Lot 183 D

“Darling, my darling, I’m so excited about your works, so looking forward to them, my dear. I know, better than anyone else besides you, everything that your art means to you, and I constantly keep in mind – as if it were a sacred legacy, a pact between us – that a yearning to develop is precisely what led you to me” (Lyonel to Julia Feininger, 15 October 1905).
Julia Feininger, née Lilienfeld, was born in Berlin in 1880. She began her artistic education in 1905 at the Grand-Ducal Saxon Art School in Weimar, and from 1920 she was a full student at the Bauhaus.
In contrast to the work of her husband and sons, scarcely any research has been done to date on the work of Julia Feininger – even though she was not just intimately familiar with the German avant-garde but was herself a multitalented graphic artist, painter and later also stage designer. It is no wonder that a vibrant artistic dialogue developed between Julia and Lyonel: in Paris in 1906, for example, the couple drew together for the magazine “Le Témoin”.
With her knowledge of printmaking techniques and painting, the artist provided important impulses for her husband’s artistic development during those years; at the same time, little of Julia Feininger’s own work has been preserved. The double-sided painting here is a rare testament to her painterly contribution to the dawn of modern art at that time.