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Lot Essay
This catalogue entry was provided by Achim Moeller. Mr. Moeller will include this painting in the forthcoming volume II of his Feininger catalogue raisonné.
In 1924, Lyonel Feininger joined with Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Alexej von Jawlensky to form the Blaue Vier or Blue Four group. But it was a prior affiliation that more greatly influenced the painting Silbersternbild. In 1919, Walter Gropius had named Feininger Formmeister at the Bauhaus in Weimar. The artist's years as a commercial cartoonist and his preoccupation with architectural forms in his paintings proved relevant to the school's program of eliminating the distinction between fine and applied arts. The Feininger woodcut which appeared on the cover of the 1919 Bauhaus manifesto represented "the spirit of devoted craftsmanship in the modern world" that was so central to the school (fig. 1). This combination of "medieval mysticism" with "modern political thought," epitomized by the idea of a Cathedral of Socialism, anticipates the present painting's simultaneous spirituality and concreteness (H. Hess, op. cit., p. 89).
With this post came the extremely practical benefit of a new workspace, for "the studio the Bauhaus gave [Feininger] offered excellent working conditions, which was immediately reflected in his output" (U. Luckhardt, Lyonel Feininger, Munich, 1989, p. 39). This space allowed Feininger, who had been painting for just twelve years, to further develop his own pictorial language, in which he created a synthesis of Cubist form, Expressionist feeling and Orphist light. As early as 1907, he articulated to his second wife Julie Berg the notion that, "what one sees must be transformed in the mind and crystallized" (quoted in ibid., p. 21). Feininger's introduction to Cubism while in Paris in 1911 confirmed that he was on the right path.
But it was not until the 1920s that Feininger imbued these cubist structures with the incandescent glow that characterizes the present painting. Hans Hess sees this command of light as a turning point for the artist: "from the illumined plane Feininger advances to the luminous plane. The new phase may be called the transparent period" (op. cit., p. 92). No longer reflecting light from other sources, the forms radiate from within, to the extent that "the light in the picture seems to originate inside the painting itself" (ibid.). The stars and crescent moon, which virtually scintillate from the layered application of silver paint, accentuate this overall sense of effulgence. The transparency of the forms from which the edifices are built contrasts with their monumentality, inducing a tension that further activates the picture.
When Feininger initially left the United States for Germany, it was not to study painting, or even illustration, but the violin. In 1921, he returned to his musical roots and began to compose fugues, contrapuntal compositions whose elaborately and calculated design is analogous to the pictorial structure in works like Silbersternbild. The elements of fugal development on which Feininger ruminated included "the possibilities of inversion, of mirror effects of overlapping, and the interpenetration and synchronization of events" (ibid., p. 98). Such reflections and intersections find visual equivalents in the present painting.
There is an unfinished fragment of Gelmeroda painted on the reverse of the present lot.
(fig. 1) Lyonel Feininger, Cathedral of Socialism, woodcut, 1919.
In 1924, Lyonel Feininger joined with Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Alexej von Jawlensky to form the Blaue Vier or Blue Four group. But it was a prior affiliation that more greatly influenced the painting Silbersternbild. In 1919, Walter Gropius had named Feininger Formmeister at the Bauhaus in Weimar. The artist's years as a commercial cartoonist and his preoccupation with architectural forms in his paintings proved relevant to the school's program of eliminating the distinction between fine and applied arts. The Feininger woodcut which appeared on the cover of the 1919 Bauhaus manifesto represented "the spirit of devoted craftsmanship in the modern world" that was so central to the school (fig. 1). This combination of "medieval mysticism" with "modern political thought," epitomized by the idea of a Cathedral of Socialism, anticipates the present painting's simultaneous spirituality and concreteness (H. Hess, op. cit., p. 89).
With this post came the extremely practical benefit of a new workspace, for "the studio the Bauhaus gave [Feininger] offered excellent working conditions, which was immediately reflected in his output" (U. Luckhardt, Lyonel Feininger, Munich, 1989, p. 39). This space allowed Feininger, who had been painting for just twelve years, to further develop his own pictorial language, in which he created a synthesis of Cubist form, Expressionist feeling and Orphist light. As early as 1907, he articulated to his second wife Julie Berg the notion that, "what one sees must be transformed in the mind and crystallized" (quoted in ibid., p. 21). Feininger's introduction to Cubism while in Paris in 1911 confirmed that he was on the right path.
But it was not until the 1920s that Feininger imbued these cubist structures with the incandescent glow that characterizes the present painting. Hans Hess sees this command of light as a turning point for the artist: "from the illumined plane Feininger advances to the luminous plane. The new phase may be called the transparent period" (op. cit., p. 92). No longer reflecting light from other sources, the forms radiate from within, to the extent that "the light in the picture seems to originate inside the painting itself" (ibid.). The stars and crescent moon, which virtually scintillate from the layered application of silver paint, accentuate this overall sense of effulgence. The transparency of the forms from which the edifices are built contrasts with their monumentality, inducing a tension that further activates the picture.
When Feininger initially left the United States for Germany, it was not to study painting, or even illustration, but the violin. In 1921, he returned to his musical roots and began to compose fugues, contrapuntal compositions whose elaborately and calculated design is analogous to the pictorial structure in works like Silbersternbild. The elements of fugal development on which Feininger ruminated included "the possibilities of inversion, of mirror effects of overlapping, and the interpenetration and synchronization of events" (ibid., p. 98). Such reflections and intersections find visual equivalents in the present painting.
There is an unfinished fragment of Gelmeroda painted on the reverse of the present lot.
(fig. 1) Lyonel Feininger, Cathedral of Socialism, woodcut, 1919.