Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956)
PROPERTY OF H.F. ‘GERRY’ LENFEST
Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956)

Figures on the Seashore (On the Beach)

细节
Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956)
Figures on the Seashore (On the Beach)
signed 'Feininger' (lower left); signed and dated 'Lyonel Feininger 1933' (on the reverse); signed and dated again and titled 'Lyonel Feininger 1933 "Figures on the Seashore"' (on a label affixed to the stretcher)
oil over black Conté crayon on canvas
15 ¾ x 20 ½ in. (40 x 52.3 cm.)
Painted in 1933
来源
Estate of the artist.
Julia Feininger, New York (by descent from the above).
Pamela Colin (Lady Harlech), London (gift from the above, 1967); sale, Christie's, New York, 10 May 1995, lot 59.
Michelle Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.
Anon. (acquired from the above); sale, Sotheby's, London, 8 February 2005, lot 27.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
出版
H. Hess, Lyonel Feininger, New York, 1961, p. 282, no. 357 (illustrated).
E. Scheyer, Lyonel Feininger, Caricature and Fantasy, Detroit, 1964, p. 147.
H. Schulz-Vanselow, Lyonel Feininger und Pommern, Kiel, 1999, p. 234 (titled Am Strand).
展览
Los Angeles Museum, The Blue Four, Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, October 1933, no. 11.
Oakland, California, Mills College Art Gallery; San Francisco Museum of Art; Seattle, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington and New York, Nierendorf Gallery, Lyonel Feininger, June 1936-May 1937, no. 17.
Santa Barbara, Faulkner Memorial Art Gallery, Lyonel Feininger, 1937, no. 19 (titled On the Sea Shore).
New York, Buchholz Gallery (Curt Valentin); New York, Willard Gallery; Detroit Institute of Fine Arts and Grosse Point, Michigan, The Russell A. Alger House, Lyonel Feininger, March-August 1941, no. 22.
New York, Buchholz Gallery (Curt Valentin), The Blue Four, Feininger, Jawlensky, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, October-November 1944, no. 4.
New York, Willard Gallery, Figures by Feininger, January-February 1946, no. 6.
Berlin, Amerika Haus, Lyonel Feininger, Werke aus dem Nachlass, September-October 1964, no. 14 (titled Am Strand).
Dallas Museum for Contemporary Art, Lyonel Feininger, A Retrospective, April-May 1963, no. 31.
Munich, Haus der Kunst and Kunsthaus Zürich, Lyonel Feininger, March-July 1973, p. 88, no. 138.

荣誉呈献

Vanessa Fusco
Vanessa Fusco

拍品专文

Achim Moeller, Managing Principal of The Lyonel Feininger Project LLC, has confirmed the authenticity of this work. The work is registered in the archives of The Lyonel Feininger Project LLC, New York - Berlin with the no. 1372-03-22-16.
Additional information has been provided by The Lyonel Feininger Project LLC, New York – Berlin overseen by Achim Moeller.

Painted in 1933, Figures on the Seashore (On the Beach) was created during increasingly difficult times for Feininger. After a long period under threat, in 1932, the Bauhaus in Dessau, where Feininger taught, was closed on the orders of the newly elected Nazi district council. The Feiningers, like so many of their friends and colleagues at the Bauhaus, were subsequently obliged to move and seek what would become an ever more difficult way of making a living elsewhere. Feininger would live with his wife, Julia, between the coastal resort of Deep, on the Baltic coast, and Berlin. He worked little during this period and felt an increasing sense of isolation and alienation as the political repression of the Nazi regime took hold throughout the country.
During this time, images of the sea populated his work. Amidst the increasing turmoil of the world around him, working by the sea provided the artist with a welcome escape: “The most beautiful landscape cannot hold my fascinated attention as does nature by the sea, and all that is connected with the water…the moon hanging low over the horizon, shining behind a fantastically shaped cloud in the sky” (Feininger quoted in Lyonel Feininger, City and Sea, 1905-1955, exh. cat., Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London, 1998, p. 2).
The present work depicts a group of figures on the beach huddled together. A small ship sails along the sea to the right of the figures. The horizon line between sea and sky is barely distinguished, the blue of the water and sky merging into one vast expanse in front of the people. The sky is fractured and angular, with blue paint of varying richness. These observers on the shore, alone with the power and vastness of the natural world can be likened to the poignant human presence in the work of the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. However, there is an additional layer of meaning for Feininger, as a joyous, if also romanticized, image of individualist freedom and escape.
Feininger’s growing sense of isolation from the land he had adopted as his home led to him gradually abandoning the German language at this time in much of his correspondence, resorting in favor to his English mother-tongue. After he was forced by a local landlord in Deep, in the ummer of 1935, not to share accommodation with his Jewish wife Julia, the Feiningers sought to leave Germany for good. In the Spring of 1936 he returned with his family to America.

fig. 1. Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, 1808-1810. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

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