Lyonel Feininger
Bauhaus master who built churches, ships and sea out of overlapping planes of transparent colour.
Lyonel Feininger was born in New York in 1871 to German musician parents and went to Germany at sixteen intending to study music. He worked for years as a newspaper cartoonist in Berlin and Chicago before turning to painting in his late thirties, absorbing Cubism in Paris and joining the Blaue Reiter circle. Walter Gropius made him the first appointment to the Bauhaus in 1919, and his woodcut of a cathedral appeared on its founding manifesto. The mature paintings — Gothic churches, the Baltic sailing barges, the sea at Deep — are built from long transparent planes of overlapping colour. Declared degenerate by the Nazis, he returned to New York in 1937 and died there in 1956.
Watercolours and ink drawings are the most frequently traded part of the work by a wide margin, and they are typically small, signed and dated in his very distinctive hand, and often inscribed with a place name. The woodcuts are numerous, many printed by the artist in small numbers. Paper condition is the recurring issue: the watercolours were often made on thin sheets and have commonly been light-struck or acid-burnt by old mounts. The Achim Moeller Institute in New York is the authority on attribution and issues opinions.
If you own a work by Lyonel Feininger
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.