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Lot Essay
Achim Moeller, Managing Principal of The Lyonel Feininger Project LLC, New York - Berlin, has confirmed the authenticity of this work, which is registered under no. 1363-12-22-15.
Calm at Sea II is the second of three great paintings bearing the same title that Lyonel Feininger made between 1926 and 1929. Each of these works is a masterful articulation of the sublime sensation of space, light and colour that Feininger so enjoyed in the dramatic coastal landscape of Deep on the Baltic coast where he summered every year between 1924 and 1935. Rendered using a near-abstract geometry of simple rectangles of subtly shifting colour, each work marks a progressive development in the uniquely cubist form of Expressionism that Feininger developed throughout the mid-1920s while teaching at the Dessau Bauhaus. During this period, the American-born artist’s diligent study of architectural space in his many paintings of local cathedrals and churches prompted in him a new vision of the light and space offered by the sea and the sky of Deep. This vision was one he sought to directly articulate in the deliberately simple, paired-down and near-abstract architectonics of paintings like Calm at Sea II.
‘I don’t paint a picture for the purpose of creating an aesthetic achievement,’ Feininger wrote to his wife Julia from Deep at this time, ‘and I never think of pictures in the traditional sense. From deep within me arises an almost painful urge for the realisation of inner experiences, an overwhelming longing, an unearthly nostalgia overcomes me at times to bring them to light out of a long lost past. Does this seem wrong? In the “present” I am only concerned with the process of work. The “past” provides the incentive. Here in Deep I am detached’ (L. Feininger, ‘Letter to Julia Feininger’, West-Deep, 2 August 1927, in J.L. Ness, ed., Lyonel Feininger, New York, 1974, p. 156). As Hans Hess has written of Feininger’s aesthetic aims at this time, in seascapes like Calm at Sea II, the artist ‘created an architecture of space: he gave it form and substance. He imposed an order: yet it was an order derived from nature and not forced upon it. Above the line of the horizons that he shows us, the sky is built in tones and planes that owe their origin as much to nature as to the ordering mind. The mind here at work is a classical mind. The immensity of space is given form and human relation: it cannot escape into a romantic world: it is commanded and held in place by its own laws’ (H. Hess, Lyonel Feininger, London, 1959, p. 100).
Recalling the romantic invocation of the sublime in nineteenth-century masterpieces such as JMW Turner’s, The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be Broken or Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, the infinity of space suggested by the sea and sky here is given a poetic and human sense of scale. Achieving this is the combination of the spire-like forms of ships passing in the distance and the equally elongated lone figures walking along the beach in the foreground, lending the composition an exaggerated breadth of perspective. With each element appearing to punctuate the painting’s otherwise seemingly infinite abstraction of space, light and colour according to an innate sense of geometry and harmony, the composition of the painting as a whole has been carefully calibrated into a pictorial fugue-like juxtaposition of disparate abstract parts. Using a cubistic technique as a kind of sacred geometry through which to define a hidden order in this world, Calm at Sea II is a work that miraculously manages to invest a typical romantic vista and its evocation of the sublime in nature, with a profoundly classical sense of an underlying unity, balance and order.
Calm at Sea II is the second of three great paintings bearing the same title that Lyonel Feininger made between 1926 and 1929. Each of these works is a masterful articulation of the sublime sensation of space, light and colour that Feininger so enjoyed in the dramatic coastal landscape of Deep on the Baltic coast where he summered every year between 1924 and 1935. Rendered using a near-abstract geometry of simple rectangles of subtly shifting colour, each work marks a progressive development in the uniquely cubist form of Expressionism that Feininger developed throughout the mid-1920s while teaching at the Dessau Bauhaus. During this period, the American-born artist’s diligent study of architectural space in his many paintings of local cathedrals and churches prompted in him a new vision of the light and space offered by the sea and the sky of Deep. This vision was one he sought to directly articulate in the deliberately simple, paired-down and near-abstract architectonics of paintings like Calm at Sea II.
‘I don’t paint a picture for the purpose of creating an aesthetic achievement,’ Feininger wrote to his wife Julia from Deep at this time, ‘and I never think of pictures in the traditional sense. From deep within me arises an almost painful urge for the realisation of inner experiences, an overwhelming longing, an unearthly nostalgia overcomes me at times to bring them to light out of a long lost past. Does this seem wrong? In the “present” I am only concerned with the process of work. The “past” provides the incentive. Here in Deep I am detached’ (L. Feininger, ‘Letter to Julia Feininger’, West-Deep, 2 August 1927, in J.L. Ness, ed., Lyonel Feininger, New York, 1974, p. 156). As Hans Hess has written of Feininger’s aesthetic aims at this time, in seascapes like Calm at Sea II, the artist ‘created an architecture of space: he gave it form and substance. He imposed an order: yet it was an order derived from nature and not forced upon it. Above the line of the horizons that he shows us, the sky is built in tones and planes that owe their origin as much to nature as to the ordering mind. The mind here at work is a classical mind. The immensity of space is given form and human relation: it cannot escape into a romantic world: it is commanded and held in place by its own laws’ (H. Hess, Lyonel Feininger, London, 1959, p. 100).
Recalling the romantic invocation of the sublime in nineteenth-century masterpieces such as JMW Turner’s, The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be Broken or Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea, the infinity of space suggested by the sea and sky here is given a poetic and human sense of scale. Achieving this is the combination of the spire-like forms of ships passing in the distance and the equally elongated lone figures walking along the beach in the foreground, lending the composition an exaggerated breadth of perspective. With each element appearing to punctuate the painting’s otherwise seemingly infinite abstraction of space, light and colour according to an innate sense of geometry and harmony, the composition of the painting as a whole has been carefully calibrated into a pictorial fugue-like juxtaposition of disparate abstract parts. Using a cubistic technique as a kind of sacred geometry through which to define a hidden order in this world, Calm at Sea II is a work that miraculously manages to invest a typical romantic vista and its evocation of the sublime in nature, with a profoundly classical sense of an underlying unity, balance and order.