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Lot Essay
Achim Moeller has confirmed the authenticity of this work. The work will be included in the archives of the Lyonel Feininger Project LLC, New York Berlin with the no. 1154-05-22-12 and in volume II of the catalogue raisonné of paintings by Lyonel Feininger, written by Achim Moeller.
Die Blaue Insel (The Blue Island) depicts a lone schooner heading over a black sea towards a sharply mountainous and angular blue isle. It is one of an extended series of paintings of ships and the sea that Feininger made regularly throughout his life and most frequently following his summers spent in the village of Deep on the Baltic coast. Painted in 1934, at the height of an extended period of isolation and austerity for Feininger following the closure of the Bauhaus and the repression of his art by the National Socialists, this Romantic image of a lone ship sailing towards a distant shore has an additional poignancy to its symbolism.
Since the closure of the Bauhaus, Feininger had been obliged to live between the coastal resort of Deep and Berlin. He worked little during this period and felt an increasing sense of isolation and alienation as the political repression of the Nazi regime took hold throughout the land. Increasingly, images of ships sailing to distant lands came to proliferate in his paintings. Archetypal symbols of hope and of the human spirit railing against the elements, ships were for Feininger a favourite and also particularly comforting subject which at this time must also have embodied a sense of escape from the troubles of the day. In early 1935 Feininger wrote to his wife Julia, 'About my work - except that I am working - I still think it best to preserve silence. I will only say that I am hopeful. (Hopeful! In a hopeless period of cultural history, in a land where all vital cultural elements are systematically persecuted, one is hopeful only for ones own endeavours.) But I come more and more to the realization that ability is of no use unless the spirit is strong. So let us keep a stout heart by all means and 'hope' all day long and even part of the night' (Lyonel Feininger, 'Letter March 29, 1935', quoted in J. Ness, ed., Lyonel Feininger, London, 1975, p. 238).
Feininger originally entitled The Blue Island in German, but this inscription, 'Die Blaue Insel', as his wife Julia pointed out, was subsequently removed. Feiningers growing sense of isolation from the land he had adopted as his home led to him gradually abandoning the German language at this time in much of his correspondence, resorting in favour to his English mother-tongue. After Feininger was obliged by a local landlord in Deep, in the Summer of 1935, not to share accommodation with his Jewish wife Julia, the Feiningers sought to leave Germany for good. In the Spring of 1936 he returned with his family to America.
Die Blaue Insel (The Blue Island) depicts a lone schooner heading over a black sea towards a sharply mountainous and angular blue isle. It is one of an extended series of paintings of ships and the sea that Feininger made regularly throughout his life and most frequently following his summers spent in the village of Deep on the Baltic coast. Painted in 1934, at the height of an extended period of isolation and austerity for Feininger following the closure of the Bauhaus and the repression of his art by the National Socialists, this Romantic image of a lone ship sailing towards a distant shore has an additional poignancy to its symbolism.
Since the closure of the Bauhaus, Feininger had been obliged to live between the coastal resort of Deep and Berlin. He worked little during this period and felt an increasing sense of isolation and alienation as the political repression of the Nazi regime took hold throughout the land. Increasingly, images of ships sailing to distant lands came to proliferate in his paintings. Archetypal symbols of hope and of the human spirit railing against the elements, ships were for Feininger a favourite and also particularly comforting subject which at this time must also have embodied a sense of escape from the troubles of the day. In early 1935 Feininger wrote to his wife Julia, 'About my work - except that I am working - I still think it best to preserve silence. I will only say that I am hopeful. (Hopeful! In a hopeless period of cultural history, in a land where all vital cultural elements are systematically persecuted, one is hopeful only for ones own endeavours.) But I come more and more to the realization that ability is of no use unless the spirit is strong. So let us keep a stout heart by all means and 'hope' all day long and even part of the night' (Lyonel Feininger, 'Letter March 29, 1935', quoted in J. Ness, ed., Lyonel Feininger, London, 1975, p. 238).
Feininger originally entitled The Blue Island in German, but this inscription, 'Die Blaue Insel', as his wife Julia pointed out, was subsequently removed. Feiningers growing sense of isolation from the land he had adopted as his home led to him gradually abandoning the German language at this time in much of his correspondence, resorting in favour to his English mother-tongue. After Feininger was obliged by a local landlord in Deep, in the Summer of 1935, not to share accommodation with his Jewish wife Julia, the Feiningers sought to leave Germany for good. In the Spring of 1936 he returned with his family to America.