Lyonel Feininger

(German/American, 1871-1956)

Taubach

Footnotes

Lyonel Feininger in Weimar and Thuringian Villages 1913 - 1914

If there was a plot of land that embodied Lyonel Feininger's artistic longing it was Weimar and its surroundings. The winding streets of the city that inspired luminaries such as Goethe, Schiller and Liszt and the characteristic churches of the neighbouring villages were depicted in so many of Feininger's works that he became irrevocably connected to the artistic narrative of the region.

Feininger first discovered Weimar in February of 1906 while visiting his future wife, Julia Berg (née Lilienfeld), who had moved there to study at the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School. While Feininger left the city later that year, he would return to the region for extended periods in both 1913 and 1914 in search of solitude and inspiration. On May 14, 1913 he wrote to Julia:

'Sketching out of doors these last days I got into a sort of ecstasy. At the end of an afternoon my whole being was functioning instinctively, my capabilities were increased to the utmost. I stood on one and the same spot drawing the same motif 3 and 4 times until I got it accordingly to my vision. That goes beyond mere observation and recording by far, it is a magnetic coordinating, liberating from all restrictions.' ¹

Feininger not only filled his 'pad with sketches, studies of trees' ² in the neighbouring park, 'two floors below Weimar' ³, but also navigated the streets of nearby villages on his bike, 'one always more beautiful than the other.' ⁴ There, in the villages of Niedergrunstedt and Taubach, he studied the barns and churches that 'ha[d] retained the character of the periods, which built them.'

Feininger celebrated the eternal quality of these traditional, small-town motifs, rendering them in his inimitable style with crayon and pencil on paper. While The Great War prohibited Feininger from returning to the region after 1914, it was fate - and the admiration of Walter Gropius - that allowed him to return to Weimar in 1919 as the first Master of the newly founded Bauhaus.

1 Feininger to Julia Feininger, Weimar, May 14 1913.
2 Feininger to Julia Feininger, Weimar, April 6 1913.
3 Feininger to Julia Feininger, Weimar, April 15 1913.
4 Ibid.



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. 1335-04-17-15.

Provenance
Alois J. Schardt, Berlin - Pomona.
Private collection, New York.

On May 15 1913 Lyonel Feininger made a trip to the village of Taubach, where he sketched this dynamic, distorted street view with typical half-timbered houses flanking the locus of the composition: a distinctive archway. This motif would reappear in another drawing nine years later and again in a watercolour from 1934, eventually serving as the basis for the painting Taubach, 1934 (Hess 364), which was destroyed during a warehouse fire in 1946.