Lyonel Feininger

Andreas Feininger, New York (the artist's son)
Gertrud E. Feininger (by descent from the above. Sold: Sotheby's, New York, 7th November 2006, lot 32)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

New York, Museum of Modern Art, Lyonel Feininger - Marsden Hartley, 1944-46
Dallas, Dallas Museum of Contemporary Arts, Lyonel Feininger: a Retrospective, 1963, no. 9
Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Lyonel Feininger: The Formative Years, 1964, no. 132
New York, Museum of Modern Art, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 1968-69, illustrated in the catalogue
Munich, Haus der Kunst, Lyonel Feininger, 1973, no. 68

Hans Hess, Lyonel Feininger, London, 1961, no. 25, illustrated p. 250

The canvas is unlined. Apart from one very small spot of retouching near the centre of the lower edge, visible under ultra-violet light, this work is in very good condition. Colours: In comparison to the printed catalogue illustration, all colours are stronger and richer in the original.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Painted in 1908, Locomotive is one of Feininger's rare and remarkable early works from the key formative period of his career as a painter. Having spent fifteen years working as a successful illustrator for periodicals in Berlin and Paris, Feininger only turned his attention to oils later in life. His career as a painter started in 1907, when he adapted one of his published cartoons into a composition in oil, a medium that allowed him greater compositional and colouristic freedom. As a painter, he took joy in creating striking tonal contrasts and using daring colour combinations in a manner similar to the Fauves, while at the same time keeping his allegiance to draughtsmanship. Like most of his oils from this period, Locomotive is composed of flat colour planes and precisely delineated forms which reflect the lasting influence of his earlier career as a graphic artist (fig. 1).

 

The present work was painted during Feininger's stay in Paris, where he took a studio on the Boulevard Raspail. His paintings from this period reflect the artist's fascination with the city and with signs of modernity, and the subject of trains and locomotives is one to which he often returned in his graphic works (fig. 1), oils (fig. 2) and drawings. The artist and his wife-to-be Julia were in Paris until the spring of 1908; later in the year they traveled to London where they got married before settling in Berlin. During the time spent in Paris Feininger worked frantically, certainly aware of the fact that he took up painting rather late in his life, and it was during these months that his characteristic style was formulated. Hans Hess wrote about the artist's work from this period: 'With one exception – a still life – all paintings of the winter of 1907-1908 are grotesques. The Wedding Trip, an old crazy Locomotive [the present work], and the Newspaper Readers I are the outcome of his old desire for the fantastic. Caricature here becomes independent; it is his second alternative of freeing himself from his past experience by finding for it a painterly expression' (H. Hess, op. cit., p. 42).

 

Feininger's experience as a graphic artist gave him a creative advantage when it came to rendering three-dimensional effects in his painting, as he was remarkably adept at conveying spatial depth without being reliant upon gradations of colour or excessive details. In Locomotive the various elements overlap in a way that suggests the notion of distance, while at the same time forming a manifestly flat surface. The choice of a vivid palette and juxtapositions of colour planes, as well as the sharp, bright outlining of the individual features that appear to be pasted onto the surface of the picture, are all derived from Feininger's experience as an illustrator. The artist's characteristic caricature-style treatment of figures is evident here in the rendering of the man in the foreground, whose exaggeratedly foreshortened features create an overstated sense of movement and perspective.

 

Writing to his wife Julia in 1908, the year the present work was executed, Feininger explained that he had become more adept as a painter, incorporating more readily the 'impressionistic' modes of execution that he had learned while working as a young illustrator in France: 'I am painting again, better than before, in my opinion. My approach has become looser and is closer to my way of drawing again... for in the past three-and-a-half months here I have been through various stages, and now come back to my Paris style... It must be right for me to be returning to the way I naturally draw and perceive, for it gives me so much confidence. This time I am using color more energetically, and I have a number of pictures in the pipeline, dear God, they only need to be painted' (quoted in Ulrich Luckhardt, Lyonel Feininger, Munich, 1989, p. 52). Over the course of the next decade, the artist completed several figural compositions in oil that are now considered some of the finest works of his career. As the focus of his paintings gradually shifted toward architecture and towards an increasingly abstract style, nothing that he would produce in later decades would come close to the whimsy and spiritedness of his early pictures, including the present work.  

According to Julia Feininger, this painting belonged to their eldest son Andreas Feininger (1906-1999) since he was a child in Paris. The work remained in the artist's family for almost a century.

 

 

Fig. 1, Lyonel Feininger, Die Überlokomotive, 1911, caricature from Licht und Schatten  

Fig. 2, Lyonel Feininger, The Manhole, 1908, oil on canvas, Private Collection

Fig. 3, Lyonel Feininger, Newspaper Readers, 1909, oil on canvas. Sold: Philips, de Pury & Luxembourg, New York, 4th November 2002