Lyonel Feininger

Provenance:

The artist’s estate

Julia Feininger

Estate of Julia Feininger

Marlborough International Fine Art Company

The charcoal drawing Mellingen III, executed on 28 July 1915, belongs to Lyonel Feininger’s Cubist phase, during which he increasingly reduced compositional elements to simple geometric forms and developed a synthesis of representational and abstract structure.

As early as 1911, an excursion had first taken Feininger to Mellingen. In the years that followed, the village on the outskirts of Weimar, with its distinctive gables and half-timbered houses, became a recurring destination for his drawing expeditions. In a letter of 15 April 1913 to Julia Feininger, he described his journeys through the villages beyond Oberweimar and praised their “old, full-of-character” churches and houses.

Feininger travelled repeatedly from Berlin to Weimar in order to roam the region with his sketchbook. The small-scale “notes from nature” produced on these occasions served as the point of departure for compositions later developed in the studio, often with a certain temporal distance from the original experience of nature. Feininger last stayed in Weimar from 7 to 30 June 1914, only a few weeks before the outbreak of the First World War. The drawing created in 1915 thus draws upon studies made before the war and transforms them in the studio into a composition of formal concentration.

In the present sheet, he condensed the village architecture of Mellingen into a structure of prismatically fractured forms. Roofs, gables and façades are broken down into triangles, rectangles and pentagons; light and shadow are articulated through differentiated hatching and areas of flat darkening. The depiction is not topographically exact, but rhythmically constructed.

The clear structural character of Thuringian village architecture offered Feininger ideal conditions for this process of formal reduction. Mellingen III exemplifies how direct observation of nature was transformed into a compositionally concentrated, almost abstract pictorial structure.