Lyonel Feininger

Kreuzende Segelschiffe 2 (Cruising Sailing Ships 2)

1919

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Etching for Stephen Spender “Fraternity”, etching and drypoint, 1939, signed in pencil lower right. Reference: Roethel 2...

Louis Marcoussis (1883-1941), Un Reve, etching, 1930, signed in pencil lower right and inscribed “2nd etat 1/2” lower left. Plate 1 of the portfolio Aurelia. Reference: Milet 55II, second state (of 4), before the edition (of 153 in the fourth state). In good condition, on a wove paper with full margins (a small area of discoloration below the border lower left, remains of prior glue right margin edge), 7 1/4 x 5 3/8, the sheet 15 5/8 x 9 3/8 inches, archival matting. A fine impression of a rare proof, before the edition. This is one of the two proofs of the second state. After this state the plate was reduced in a third state (from 183 to 174 mm), and then steel faced for the edition. Provenance: Libreria Prandi Reggio (blindstamp lower right corner) Jean Cassou and Pierre Courthion asked Marcoussis to illustrate Aurelia, a novel by Gerard de Merval. This was the first album of their collection “Le Blanc et Le Noir,” edition chez Fourcade. Marcoussis was familiar with this novel, in which imagination and reality intermingle. In it de Merval wrote: “La Reve est une seconde vie.” (The Dream is a parallel life.) Marcoussis wrote of the print: “Il ressemblait a l’Ange de la Melancholie d’Albrecht Durer.” (It recalls the angel in Durer’s Melancholia...

Jean-Emile Laboureur (1877-1943) etching and engraving Paysage au Buttes-Chaumont (2nd Planche), 1920-21, signed and numbered ( 38/55) in pencil. Reference: Sylvain Laboureur 205. In very good condition with wide margins (remains of old hinging on margin verso, some showing through not near image). On white wove paper, 7 7/8 x 9 1/4, the sheet 10 x 13 1/2 inches, archival matting. A fine, fresh and clear impression of this important cubist-influenced scene. Jean-Emile Laboureur was born in Nantes in 1877. He traveled to Paris in 1895 intending to study law at the Sorbonne, but found himself drawn to the nearby famed Academie Julian, and although he never officially matriculated there, he became immersed in the Parisian art scene. Laboureur then traveled widely, staying for periods in the US and London, and studying classic art and printmaking in Italy and Germany. Although he had moved back to Paris by 1910, a time when analytical cubism was emerging in the work of Picasso and Braque, he continued working in an abstract, modernist mode, waiting until about 1913 or shortly thereafter to invent a cubist idiom all his own. Cubism remained an important theme for Laboureur, a theme he varied, sometimes using it as a strong design or compositional component, sometimes only as a subtle background element. In Paysage aux Buttes...

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Etching 1916 Number II, drypoint, signed in pencil lower right, titled, numbered (No. 9) and dated lower left [also with initials and date in the plate lower right]. Reference: Roethel 154, only state, edition of 10. In excellent condition (the barest handling fold at sheet edge), printed on a heavy ivory wove paper, the full sheet with full margins, 4 7/8 x 3 1/4, the sheet 17 1/2 x 13 inches, archival mount with window mat. A fine fresh impression of this great rarity, printed in a dark brown ink. Kandinsky created this drypoint (erroneously named Etching 1916) in early 1916 while staying with Gabriel Munter in Stockholm during the winter of 1915-16. This is from the second series of drypoints he made; the first was in the year 1913-14. Provenance: Kornfeld Auction, Bern, June 2007. The tiny size of this edition (10) makes this print a great rarity within the Kandinsky’s printed...

This work is hand signed in ink by the artist “Feininger” in the lower left margin. It is also dated in black ink "ii . ix . 50" [2nd September 1950] at the lower right corner. Pro...

Lyonel Feininger, 'Da-Da I' also titled by the artist 'Der Abgott' (The Idol), woodcut, 1918, a proof impression. Prasse W91. Signed in pencil and annotated '1876', the artist’s inv...

Lyonel Feininger, 'Three Masted Ship, 2 (Dreimastiges Schiff, 2)', woodcut, 1937, one of a small but unknown number of letterhead proofs; Prasse W296. Feininger estate stamp and inventory no. 'W 865' in pencil, bottom left sheet corner. Annotated 'W 296' and 'on block : 3702a' in pencil, bottom right sheet corner. A fine impression, on cream, laid, letterhead stock; hinge remains on the left and right top sheet edges, verso, in excellent condition. Very scarce. Image size 2 1/4 x 2 11/16 inches; sheet size 10 x 6 3/4 inches. Archivally sleeved, unmatted. Exhibited: 'Lyonel Feininer, Woodcuts Used As Letterheads'; Associated American Artists; Feb 4 - March 2, 1974; New York, NY. 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, but 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 crowned...

Executed in 1950 during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism and non-representational art, Feininger reduces a landscape to the bare minimums of lines and wash. Moeller Fine Art