Timeless modernist masterpieces: Lyonel Feininger's seascapes
Lyonel Feininger devoted much of his artistic efforts to seascapes all his life. He was among the few modern artists who discovered the great potential that the traditional genre of marine painting offered. Sea, sky, clouds, sun and moon, stars, ships, ocean liners, figures on the beach, harbors, and piers represent a relatively small but ostensibly inexhaustible repertoire from which the artist composed seascapes throughout all his creative phases. Apart from his architectural works, they represent the most important body of works in Lyonel Feininger's entire oeuvre, enduring all stylistic changes and encompassing both his famous prismatic masterpieces of the Bauhaus period and the intimate, atmospheric works of his late work.
"Seascape" from 1947 is part of the body of geometric-abstract works Feininger created after returning to the USA. Both the color palette and the motifs are reduced. Only two small figures are positioned on the beach before a motionless sea in the foreground. The cloudy sky dominates everything in front of them. The clash of the elements and the stark contrast between man and nature creates a landscape depiction imbued with tender poetry and atmospheric mysticism despite its radical reduction of form and color. References to Romanticism, such as Caspar David Friedrich's "The Monk by the Sea," can be sensed here, as well as allusions to the art of William Turner. Feininger is said to have visited an exhibition of the English artist's work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York the year this work was painted. Clouds in a rhythmic arrangement and the interplay of black-and-white accents reveal a connection to Feininger's love of classical music. The son of a violinist and a singer, his parents had initially wanted him to study music. Feininger remained closely connected to music into old age and composed his own fugues, which are characterized by polyphony and also appear to echo softly in "Seascape".
While living in Germany, Feininger showed a keen interest in the impressive weather phenomena and cloud formations over the Baltic Sea and captured them in small-format pencil drawings, the so-called “notes of nature.” He would use them as models for paintings and watercolors many years later. "Seascape" was not executed before 1947 after his return to the USA and is also based on memories of Dzwirzyno (formerly Deep) on the Baltic Sea, as seen in the parallel piers leading into the sea. Decades later, these formative memories of nature were still so present in Feininger's work that he transformed them into transcendental pictorial experiences.
Feininger's seascapes owe their timeless effect not only to the beauty and sublime grandeur of the natural spectacle but, above all, to his ability to make an artistic shift from pure observation to the cultivation of a timeless pictorial cosmos in which he visualizes the human impression of nature and the elementary world of thought that goes with it. In a letter to Julia Feininger from 1932, he described this effect in the following beautiful words: "That is why I spend hours on the beach - unable to write a single word. These thoughts, the sea spread out before me, with the immeasurable sky above, conjure up thoughts from my innermost depths that revolve around the inexpressible, inspiring me to create images that are ultimately my language." (Lyonel Feininger in a letter to Julia Feininger from June 4, 1932). [AR]