LYONEL FEININGER (1871-1956)
(Gelmeroda)
pencil on paper
6 1/4 x 8 1/16 in (15.9 x 20.5 cm)
Executed circa 1914
Footnotes:
The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Achim Moeller, Managing Principal of The Lyonel Feininger Project LLC, New York – Berlin, registered under no. 1646-03-04-20.

Provenance
Alois J. Schardt Collection, Halle, Berlin & Los Angeles (a gift from the artist).
Thence by descent to the previous owner.
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1985.

Exhibited
Halle (Saale), Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, Lyonel Feininger, Gelmeroda: Ein Maler und sein Motiv, April 2 – May 21, 1995, no. 112 (later travelled to Wuppertal).
New York, Achim Moeller Fine Art, Lyonel Feininger: From the Gelmeroda Cycle, November 7 – December 22, 2000, no. 33.
Lancaster, Charles Demuth Museum, Lyonel Feininger: 20 Watercolors, April 4 – May 25, 2003.
Wuppertal, Von der Heydt-Museum, Lyonel Feininger, September 17 – November 19, 2006.
Apolda, Kunsthaus Apolda Avantgarde, Traumstadt: Lyonel Feininger und seine Dörfer, September 15 – December 15, 2019, no. 42.


The present drawing depicts the village of Gelmeroda on the outskirts of Weimar which Lyonel Feininger first visited in the summer of 1906. Soon thereafter, the town and its Gothic church began to appear as a backdrop in his figurative oils and drawings, and in 1913 he painted the first of what would be a series of thirteen monumental oils focusing exclusively on the church and its spire. Executed over the course of more than two decades, the Gelmeroda series demonstrates Feininger's engagement with a vocabulary of layered, prismatic forms during this period. Here the artist adopts the angled fragmentation of form and space found in Cubism and Italian Futurism to give a sense of spiritual energy and transcendence.

Feininger was first introduced to early forms of Cubism, a movement which would have a profound impact on his oeuvre, during a three-week trip to Paris in 1911. He had sent six paintings to be included in the Salon des Indépendants, and the Cubist paintings that Feininger encountered at the Salon came as a revelation. In a letter to his friend, the painter and art critic Alfred Vance Churchill, Feininger wrote, 'in that Spring I had gone to Paris and found the world agog with Cubism–a thing I had never even heard mentioned before, but which I had already, entirely intuitively, striven after for years' (letter dated 13 March 1913; quoted in H. Hess, Lyonel Feininger, New York, 1961, p. 52).

The sheet is hinged at two points to its mount along the upper edge, verso. The lower edge is deckled. A couple of very minute knicks to the left edge. A few scattered faint spots of foxing to the sheet. Subject to the foregoing, it is in our opinion that the work appears to be in excellent condition.