Picture "Two Boats on the Sea at Sundown" (1934) (Unique piece)
Picture "Two Boats on the Sea at Sundown" (1934) (Unique piece)
Quick info
unique piece | dated | chalk and pencil on paper | framed | size 31 x 39 cm
Detailed description
Picture "Two Boats on the Sea at Sundown" (1934) (Unique piece)
The present colour chalk drawing was created ten years after the work "Wolken über'm Meer", also in the town of Deep on the Baltic Sea. Feininger was particularly fascinated by the sunsets over the sea. He went to the beach every day to watch them and realised that no two were the same. He describes them in enthusiastic letters to Julia: "Of a silver-coloured sunset with the sky full of soft misty clouds and concentrated by wonderful clouds, in motion, swept inland by the storm; behind them radially rising cirrus clouds with unbelievably delicate hues, pink on an apple-blue and plum-blue sky background". He recorded his impressions in drawings in chalk and pencil on paper. In 1935, Feininger emigrated to the USA with his wife and never returned to the Baltic Sea.
Coloured chalk and pencil on paper, 1934, dated. With certificate from Achim Moeller, The Lyonel Feininger Project LLC. Motif size/sheet size 14 x 22 cm. Size in frame 31 x 39 cm as shown.
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About Lyonel Feininger
1871-1956
Lyonel Feininger is known for his depictions of streets, cities and ships, which are composed of prismatically broken forms and inspired by Cubism and the art of Robert Delaunay.
The painter and graphic artist was born in New York in 1871 as the son of German musicians. He first came to Germany at the age of 16 for a concert tour of his parents and stayed there to study at the Hamburg School of Applied Arts and later at the Royal Prussian Academy in Berlin. After a study visit to Paris, he continued living and working for many years in Germany, where he was close to the "Blauer Reiter" artists' group. Starting in 1919, he made his mark as a master for the graphic workshops of "Bauhaus" in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin.
Feininger, along with Schlemmer, most explicitly realised the Bauhaus ideal of order. For him, the starting point is not the human figure but architecture, the strict geometric structure of forms that he observed in Gothic churches. His studies of the architecture of small German towns established his light-flooded, prismatic style, which was to become a model for many artists.
Feininger first devoted himself to German townscapes and churches. During the National Socialist era, the Nazi Party officially declared Feininger’s work to be "degenerate", which forced him to return to New York in 1937. There he created his famous impressions of the architecture of Manhattan and New York.
A one-of-a-kind or unique piece is a work of art personally created by the artist. It exists only once due to the type of production (oil painting, watercolour, drawing, lost-wax sculpture etc.).
In addition to the classic unique pieces, there are also the so-called "serial unique pieces". They present a series of works with the same colour, motif and technique, manually prepared by the same artist. The serial unique pieces are rooted in "serial art", a genre of modern art that aims to create an aesthetic effect through series, repetitions, and variations of the same objects or themes or a system of constant and variable elements or principles.
The historical starting point is considered to be Claude Monet's "Les Meules" (1890/1891), where, for the first time, a series was created that went beyond a mere group of works. The other artists, who addressed to the serial art, include Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian and above all Gerhard Richter.