LYONEL FEININGER

SHIPS AND SEA

There is a long tradition of presenting Lyonel Feininger’s artistic work in the Warmbüchenstraβe building that now houses the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation. After years of ostracisation and the Second World War, it was here that the first two majorFeininger exhibitions were staged – 40 watercolours in 1951, and 89 paintings, watercolours and drawings in 1954. In 1919, just three years after it was founded, the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover hosted an exhibition showcasing works by Feininger and Paul Klee. In 1926 Feininger’s work featured in an exhibition on the Bauhaus Dessau, followed by a comprehensive solo exhibition in 1932. 

The work of Lyonel Feininger, who was born in New York in 1871 and retained his American citizenship his entire life, is mostly considered from two different perspectives. One reveals him as the painter of the crystalline architecture of Thuringian villages and churches, while the other focuses on his work as the creator of light-flooded, transparently layered colour surfaces, which communicate highly atmospheric feelings in all their variations.

The Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation exhibition concentrates on another aspect, namely on ships and the sea, as the most important thematic and pictorial world across the artist’s whole oeuvre. It displays Feininger’s passion for the varied landscape motifsand meteorological phenomena of the sea, and positions him as well-versed in different varieties of ship and as an enthusiastic chronicler of life at the beach and on the coast. The exhibition documents Feininger’s formative encounter with the BalticSea, at a time when he was beginning to break away from the whimsical figure paintings of his early work. It was with his stay at the Bay of Lübeck in 1921, together with Wassily Kandinsky and the founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, that Feininger’s artistic preoccupation with the Baltic’s wide expanse and constantly changing atmosphere was born. 

From his first visit to the Pomeranian village of Deep, which sits directly at the mouth of the Riga on the Baltic, the sea, and the ships, sailing boats and steamboats that sailed upon it, became an established central theme in his oeuvre. Feininger’s summer travels, which lasted for several months, were for him working holidays,spent far away from the Dessau Bauhaus at which he had taught and worked at since 1919. They continued until 1935 – though in the last year in the absence of his wife Julia, a decision taken as a precaution, because as a Jew she was being subjected to hostility. In summer 1936, he received a lectureship in California. After travelling together to the United States of America, Feininger’s first visit to his home country since his arrival in Europe in 1887, the couple decided to leave Germany the following year and move to New York. On the one hand, compared with other German emigrants, this decision was easy for Feininger, because he was familiar with the language and culture of the USA. But on the other hand, he had to leave his artistic motifs, as well as his whole artistic foundation, behind in Germany. Right up until his death, his memories of the sand dunes of Deep and the sailing boats on the Baltic shaped the painter’s later works.

The exhibition uses around fifty works from the years 1910 to 1955 to shine a light on all aspects of Feininger’s oeuvre concerned with ships and the sea. Paintings, watercolours, drawings and woodcuts are on display, some of which are on loan from museums, some of which come from predominantly northern German private collections and which often have not been on public display for decades. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue and is curated by Ulrich Luckhardt, who isinternationally regarded as one of the leading experts on the work of Lyonel Feininger.