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Lot Essay
In 1937, New York-born Lyonel Feininger returned to his hometown nearly five decades after first moving to Germany. In those intervening years, a teenage Feininger—initially sent abroad to study music—would later develop a distinctly lyrical, crystalline style of Expressionist mark-making, ultimately becoming not only the first faculty member of the renowned Bauhaus school, but a defining figure of the interwar German avant-garde. Borrowing the cool, hard edges of Cubism and inflecting them with a deeply ennobling, psychological attunement, Feininger found built environments to be a perfect domain for his pictorial explorations. Famously, his architectural woodcut Kathedral (1919) would serve as the cover design for Walter Gropius’s Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses in Weimar.
The present work, City at Night, painted shortly after a great change in the artist’s life, remains true to core of his aesthetic interests as he delights in his new surroundings. Skyscrapers tower over the viewer, stretching above and receding down a long Manhattan avenue; their myriad windows and patterns buzz, playing off each other. As one’s gaze drifts upwards to admire the verve of the knife-edge peaks, a deep blue sky pulls the two sides of the street together. Four bright stars preside, proudly, over the scene, not dissimilar to the gleaming beacons of Kathedral. While there are no passersby in City at Night, Manhattan feels alive and promising in this moment of evening architectural reverie, as if the city Feininger has come to re-know will be a new home for his imaginative powers.
Despite Feininger’s central place in the German avant-garde by the time of his relocation, his importance in the United States was not yet written in stone. Gallerist Curt Valentin, the first owner of City at Night, was indispensable in forging inroads for Feininger, exhibiting his works widely. In a letter to Valentin, two years after he painted City at Night, Feininger appears particularly proud of his recent cityscapes: “You write that you were thinking the other day of a Feininger exhibition under the heading ‘Old Architecture.’ I think that would be a misleading title, for whatever architecture I have ever painted was certainly never accurate portrayal, but entirely subordinated to my formal requirements… It might be better,” the artist continued, “to make an exhibition of ‘Manhattan’” (L. Feininger, letter to C. Valentin, 3 September 1943). This Manhattan scene would pass through the important American collections of Stanley J. and Marcia Wolf, Lester and Joan Avnet, and Herbert A. Goldstone before it was acquired by its late owner. City at Night has remained in this private collection for nearly thirty years.
The present work, City at Night, painted shortly after a great change in the artist’s life, remains true to core of his aesthetic interests as he delights in his new surroundings. Skyscrapers tower over the viewer, stretching above and receding down a long Manhattan avenue; their myriad windows and patterns buzz, playing off each other. As one’s gaze drifts upwards to admire the verve of the knife-edge peaks, a deep blue sky pulls the two sides of the street together. Four bright stars preside, proudly, over the scene, not dissimilar to the gleaming beacons of Kathedral. While there are no passersby in City at Night, Manhattan feels alive and promising in this moment of evening architectural reverie, as if the city Feininger has come to re-know will be a new home for his imaginative powers.
Despite Feininger’s central place in the German avant-garde by the time of his relocation, his importance in the United States was not yet written in stone. Gallerist Curt Valentin, the first owner of City at Night, was indispensable in forging inroads for Feininger, exhibiting his works widely. In a letter to Valentin, two years after he painted City at Night, Feininger appears particularly proud of his recent cityscapes: “You write that you were thinking the other day of a Feininger exhibition under the heading ‘Old Architecture.’ I think that would be a misleading title, for whatever architecture I have ever painted was certainly never accurate portrayal, but entirely subordinated to my formal requirements… It might be better,” the artist continued, “to make an exhibition of ‘Manhattan’” (L. Feininger, letter to C. Valentin, 3 September 1943). This Manhattan scene would pass through the important American collections of Stanley J. and Marcia Wolf, Lester and Joan Avnet, and Herbert A. Goldstone before it was acquired by its late owner. City at Night has remained in this private collection for nearly thirty years.