Bauhaus Landscape Prints

Lyonel Feininger, 'Manhattan 1, stone 2', lithograph, 1951, edition 25. Prasse L 16. Titled 'Manhattan I and Stone II' in pencil, in the bottom right sheet edge. A fine impression on off-white Rives wove paper, with full margins (1 1/2 to 2 3/4 inches), in excellent condition. Scarce. Matted to museum standards, unframed. Image size 11 1/4 x 8 5/8 inches (286 x 219 mm); 16 x 11 1/2 sheet size: inches (406 x 292 mm). Matted to museum standards, unframed. ABOUT THIS WORK Feininger produced only 20 lithographs throughout his prolific career—a handful of much earlier works created from 1906-12 were never editioned, with only a few proofs providing a record of those formative experiments. The success of his signature work, 'Off the Coast, Stone 3' created in 1951 for the Print Club of Cleveland, led the artist to produce five other lithographs from 1951-1955 printed by master lithographer George C. Miller as was the Print Club edition. Impressions of this work are held in the collections of the Boston Public Library, Cambridge Fine Arts Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Bezalel National Art Museum (Jerusalem), Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Washington Library of Congress. ABOUT THE ARTIST Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) was born in New York City into a musical family—his father was a violinist and composer, his mother was a singer and pianist. He studied violin with his father, and by the age of 12, he was performing in public. Still, he also drew incessantly, most notably the steamboats and sailing ships on the Hudson and East Rivers, and the landscape around Sharon, Conn., where he spent time on a farm owned by a family friend. At the age of 16 he left New York to study music and art in Germany, from where his parents emigrated. Drawn more to the visual arts, he attended schools in Hamburg, Berlin, and Paris from 1887 to 1892. After completing his studies, Feininger began his artistic career as a cartoonist and illustrator, his originality leading him to great success. In 1906, after working for a dozen years in Germany, he was offered a job as a cartoonist at the Chicago Tribune, the largest circulation newspaper in the Midwest. He worked there for a year, inventing what became the standard design for the comic strip: in the words of John Carlin, “an overall pattern. . . that allowed the page to be read both as a series of elements one after the other, like language and as a group of juxtaposed images, like visual art.” His originality did not end there: he went on to become one of the great abstract painters. Like Kandinsky, music was his model, but Kandinsky only knew music from the outside—as a listener (inspired initially by Wagner, then by Schoenberg)—while Feininger knew it from the inside. He lived in Paris from 1906 to 1908, during which time he met and was influenced by the work of progressive painters Robert Delaunay and Jules Pascin, as well as that of Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh. He began painting full-time, developing his distinctive Iyrical style based on Cubist and Expressionist idioms and a concern for the emotive qualities of light and color. He exhibited with the Der Blaue Reiter group in 1913, and in 1917, he had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin. One year after his solo exhibition, in 1918, Feininger began making woodcuts. He became enamored with the medium, producing an impressive 117 in his first year of exploring the printmaking medium. In 1919 at the invitation of the architect Walter Gropius, he was appointed the first master at the newly formed Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar. His woodcut of a cathedral...

Lyonel Feininger, 'Off the Coast, stone 3 (Vor Der Kuste, Stein 3)', lithograph, 1951, edition 250, Prasse L 14 II. Signed in pencil. Printed by master lithographer George C. Miller,...

No. 8 of the portfolio 'Zwolf Holzschnitte von Lyonel Feininger', 1921; Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar, publisher. A fine, black impression, on fibrous cream Japan paper; the full sheet ...