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Lot Essay
Drawing botas and ships were an occupation of Feininger's from the artist's early childhood. The ship on the sea is a recurrent theme throughout his artistic career. Not only did he play with model ships in the pond in Central Park, but he also was fascinated by the multitude of ships in the harbour. In a letter to a friend he recalled: "The waterfront of Manhattan was a magnificent spectacle: tall ships, forests of masts and yards, long slanting-up bowsprits, reaching fom above fantastic figureheads right across West Street almost to the building opposite, stood side by side for many hundreds of yards along the shore. The Hudson, the East River, each crawled with sailing sloops, schooners, brigs, ships and paddlewheel steamers" (Letter to Theodore Spicer-Simpson, 18 September 1937, quoted in H. Hess, Lyonel Feininger, London 1961, p. 2).
Das SternenschiffI was executed during Feininger's last years in Germany at a time when the political situation was becoming increasingly difficult for the artist. Between 1926 and 1930, Feininger's career had taken off. Exhibitions of contemporary art held in German musuems and in private galleries had followed in rapid succession. In Berlin, the director of the Nationalgalerie, Ludwig Justi had arranged a room at the Kronprinzen Palais, solely devoted to Feininger's work. Moreover, this prosperous time came to an abrupt halt in 1937 when 350 works of art by Feininger were banned from German public collections. Feininger produced few paintings during his last years in Germany and it was a time when the phase of light flooded transparently in his work came to an end. When instead, the planes and shapes of his work become stronger, more vibrant and solid in colour. A sense of a growing isolation also becomes increasingly evident in his work of this period. In Das Sternenschiff I the sailboat seems isolated in the middle of a huge sea. The rapport between Feininger and the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich has often been stressed. Both these artists painted the Pomeranian shore and both artists seascapes are transcendent depictions of the notion of netherland, the mood of longing, and of man and the universe. However, while Friedrich paints an allegory with a general validity for the onlooker, Feininger gives a personal insight into his state of mind.
On May 31, 1937 Feininger wrote to his son Lux, who had moved to the United States a shore time before: "I feel twenty-five years younger knowing that I am going to a country where imagination in art and abstraction are not an utter crime, as they are here... Of the thirty pictures I began since last autumn, only six of eight have been finished. I have wiped out all the others." (quoted in U. Luckhard, Lyonel Feininger, Munich 1989, p. 44). Just two weeks later Feininger and his wife Julia left Germany by sea.
Das SternenschiffI was executed during Feininger's last years in Germany at a time when the political situation was becoming increasingly difficult for the artist. Between 1926 and 1930, Feininger's career had taken off. Exhibitions of contemporary art held in German musuems and in private galleries had followed in rapid succession. In Berlin, the director of the Nationalgalerie, Ludwig Justi had arranged a room at the Kronprinzen Palais, solely devoted to Feininger's work. Moreover, this prosperous time came to an abrupt halt in 1937 when 350 works of art by Feininger were banned from German public collections. Feininger produced few paintings during his last years in Germany and it was a time when the phase of light flooded transparently in his work came to an end. When instead, the planes and shapes of his work become stronger, more vibrant and solid in colour. A sense of a growing isolation also becomes increasingly evident in his work of this period. In Das Sternenschiff I the sailboat seems isolated in the middle of a huge sea. The rapport between Feininger and the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich has often been stressed. Both these artists painted the Pomeranian shore and both artists seascapes are transcendent depictions of the notion of netherland, the mood of longing, and of man and the universe. However, while Friedrich paints an allegory with a general validity for the onlooker, Feininger gives a personal insight into his state of mind.
On May 31, 1937 Feininger wrote to his son Lux, who had moved to the United States a shore time before: "I feel twenty-five years younger knowing that I am going to a country where imagination in art and abstraction are not an utter crime, as they are here... Of the thirty pictures I began since last autumn, only six of eight have been finished. I have wiped out all the others." (quoted in U. Luckhard, Lyonel Feininger, Munich 1989, p. 44). Just two weeks later Feininger and his wife Julia left Germany by sea.