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Lot Essay
Achim Moeller, Managing Principal of The Lyonel Feininger Project LLC, has confirmed the authenticity of this work. The work is registered in the archives of The Lyonel Feininger Project LLC, New York – Berlin with the no. 1246-12-23-13 and will be included in volume I of the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings by Lyonel Feininger edited by Achim Moeller. Information for this catalogue entry was provided by Achim Moeller, Managing Principal of The Lyonel Feininger Project LLC, New York – Berlin.
‘Weimar has always been and always will be the town of the miracle of my life,’ Feininger wrote home to his wife Julia from the city in April 1913. For Feininger, a frequent visitor from Berlin, this peaceful and dignified Thuringian city provided the inspiration for many of the most radical developments in his art. Alongside the two churches of the nearby towns of Gelmeroda and Vollersroda, the small bridge over the Ilm river at Ober-Weimar, first shown to him by Julia on his visit there in 1906, was one of Feininger’s favourite places to paint. ‘How happy I am on this bridge I can’t begin to tell you,’ he once wrote her, and like the two churches, this little bridge became one of the abiding motifs of his work and the location where many of his finest pictures were made.
Feininger painted the Ober-Weimar bridge seen in this work no less than six times between 1912 and 1919. Highly prized by the artist as indicative of the new style he was attempting to forge from 1912 onwards, each rendering of this scene is strikingly different from the next. Indeed, in 1917 Paul Westheim dedicated an article to the surprising contrast between two of the paintings from the series (Bridges I and III) describing how different they were despite their similarly prismatic cubist approach. For Feininger this difference in form and atmosphere between the two paintings was a result of the complete difference in time and mood when they were painted. Following the publication of this article he wrote back to Westheim, pointing out that although both paintings derived from precisely the same source, they were the product of entirely different stimuli. ‘Of the two Bridges that you compare,’ Feininger wrote, ‘the mobile, light picture was painted in 1913 in Weimar itself. (The bridge is the one in Ober-Weimar in both paintings!) It was painted in the summer and I was happy… the other picture was painted in January, at a tormented time’ (Feininger, Letter of 5 October 1917, quoted in U. Luckhardt, Lyonel Feininger, Munich, 1989, p. 80).
Brücke II (which is in fact the third painting of the bridge that Feininger made after Brücke 0 of 1912 and Brücke I of 1913) was painted in 1914 around the time that Feininger was writing confidently to his wife about how ‘I now know how to proceed and this anxious seeking has stopped. There can be nothing stronger or more firmly fundamental for me than what I am now attempting. I can’t be captivated by the merely charming in art, if it is nothing but pleasantly attractive, I am unable to content myself with it…’ (Feininger, quoted in J.L. Ness, ed., Lyonel Feininger, London, 1975, p. 80).
Brücke II marks a return to the composition Feininger had first selected in Brücke 0, this time rendered with the new and unique prismatic form of Cubist fragmentation that the artist had recently developed. Following an abandoned earlier attempt to paint Brücke I, Feininger had developed another version of the bridge - as seen from the top - in his painting Auf der Brücke of 1913. This painting, like the present work, attempted to use Cubist distortion as a means of conveying Feininger’s emotional response to the feeling instilled in him by the bridge. This emotional form of Cubism was, Feininger said, a conscious technique that he described as being in many ways ‘the reverse of the French Cubist’s aims’ and based on the ‘principal of monumentality and concentration to the absolute extreme possible’. It was, he felt, a focusing of his ‘inner visions’, either ‘compositional or before Nature’ and made ‘after Nature’ not giving an ‘impression of it’ that enabled him ‘to learn, and to collect and widen my knowledge.’ Feininger’s new Cubist paintings, which he believed had begun to emerge in late 1912, ‘show far more than my notes, what I have received from nature... With each new picture I make giant strides, since the Fall (of) 1912 it seems to all acquainted or interested in my work, scarcely credible - but I am building upon a foundation to endure, and am very sure, now, that I am following the only possible lines for my development’ (letter to Alfred Vance Churchill, 13 March 1913, quoted in E. Scheyer, Lyonel Feininger: Caricature and Fantasy, Detroit, 1964, p. 167).
As this semi-abstracting Cubist approach to his painting began to develop, Feininger found himself reworking earlier compositions in the new style and returning time and again to the same source imagery - churches such as the ones at Gelmeroda, Vollersroda and other small towns around Weimar and the little gothic Ober-Weimar bridge over the Ilm. In both these cases it was the emotional impact that the architecture of these structures inspired in him that kept him coming back to the same motif. In the case of the Ober-Weimar bridge, Feininger was fascinated by its unique architecture because, with its high arches, grandiose design yet miniature scale, it seemed to him to compress a sense of the monumental into a very small space. In his depictions of it Feininger consciously attempted to allow the intuitive feelings he held towards its architecture to be expressed by exaggerating and extending the angularity of its stone structure in such a way as to transform it into a seemingly living entity. In this way, and as he was to do with the churches of Gelmeroda and Vollersroda, the bridge over the Ilm became an architectonic expression of his own, often excited, mental state. It was a fugue-like crystallization of form centred on the outward expression of what he once described as an ‘ecstatic… magnetic cohesion’ between himself and the subject he was painting’ (Feininger, quoted in B. Haskell, Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World, New York, 2011, p. 51).
‘Weimar has always been and always will be the town of the miracle of my life,’ Feininger wrote home to his wife Julia from the city in April 1913. For Feininger, a frequent visitor from Berlin, this peaceful and dignified Thuringian city provided the inspiration for many of the most radical developments in his art. Alongside the two churches of the nearby towns of Gelmeroda and Vollersroda, the small bridge over the Ilm river at Ober-Weimar, first shown to him by Julia on his visit there in 1906, was one of Feininger’s favourite places to paint. ‘How happy I am on this bridge I can’t begin to tell you,’ he once wrote her, and like the two churches, this little bridge became one of the abiding motifs of his work and the location where many of his finest pictures were made.
Feininger painted the Ober-Weimar bridge seen in this work no less than six times between 1912 and 1919. Highly prized by the artist as indicative of the new style he was attempting to forge from 1912 onwards, each rendering of this scene is strikingly different from the next. Indeed, in 1917 Paul Westheim dedicated an article to the surprising contrast between two of the paintings from the series (Bridges I and III) describing how different they were despite their similarly prismatic cubist approach. For Feininger this difference in form and atmosphere between the two paintings was a result of the complete difference in time and mood when they were painted. Following the publication of this article he wrote back to Westheim, pointing out that although both paintings derived from precisely the same source, they were the product of entirely different stimuli. ‘Of the two Bridges that you compare,’ Feininger wrote, ‘the mobile, light picture was painted in 1913 in Weimar itself. (The bridge is the one in Ober-Weimar in both paintings!) It was painted in the summer and I was happy… the other picture was painted in January, at a tormented time’ (Feininger, Letter of 5 October 1917, quoted in U. Luckhardt, Lyonel Feininger, Munich, 1989, p. 80).
Brücke II (which is in fact the third painting of the bridge that Feininger made after Brücke 0 of 1912 and Brücke I of 1913) was painted in 1914 around the time that Feininger was writing confidently to his wife about how ‘I now know how to proceed and this anxious seeking has stopped. There can be nothing stronger or more firmly fundamental for me than what I am now attempting. I can’t be captivated by the merely charming in art, if it is nothing but pleasantly attractive, I am unable to content myself with it…’ (Feininger, quoted in J.L. Ness, ed., Lyonel Feininger, London, 1975, p. 80).
Brücke II marks a return to the composition Feininger had first selected in Brücke 0, this time rendered with the new and unique prismatic form of Cubist fragmentation that the artist had recently developed. Following an abandoned earlier attempt to paint Brücke I, Feininger had developed another version of the bridge - as seen from the top - in his painting Auf der Brücke of 1913. This painting, like the present work, attempted to use Cubist distortion as a means of conveying Feininger’s emotional response to the feeling instilled in him by the bridge. This emotional form of Cubism was, Feininger said, a conscious technique that he described as being in many ways ‘the reverse of the French Cubist’s aims’ and based on the ‘principal of monumentality and concentration to the absolute extreme possible’. It was, he felt, a focusing of his ‘inner visions’, either ‘compositional or before Nature’ and made ‘after Nature’ not giving an ‘impression of it’ that enabled him ‘to learn, and to collect and widen my knowledge.’ Feininger’s new Cubist paintings, which he believed had begun to emerge in late 1912, ‘show far more than my notes, what I have received from nature... With each new picture I make giant strides, since the Fall (of) 1912 it seems to all acquainted or interested in my work, scarcely credible - but I am building upon a foundation to endure, and am very sure, now, that I am following the only possible lines for my development’ (letter to Alfred Vance Churchill, 13 March 1913, quoted in E. Scheyer, Lyonel Feininger: Caricature and Fantasy, Detroit, 1964, p. 167).
As this semi-abstracting Cubist approach to his painting began to develop, Feininger found himself reworking earlier compositions in the new style and returning time and again to the same source imagery - churches such as the ones at Gelmeroda, Vollersroda and other small towns around Weimar and the little gothic Ober-Weimar bridge over the Ilm. In both these cases it was the emotional impact that the architecture of these structures inspired in him that kept him coming back to the same motif. In the case of the Ober-Weimar bridge, Feininger was fascinated by its unique architecture because, with its high arches, grandiose design yet miniature scale, it seemed to him to compress a sense of the monumental into a very small space. In his depictions of it Feininger consciously attempted to allow the intuitive feelings he held towards its architecture to be expressed by exaggerating and extending the angularity of its stone structure in such a way as to transform it into a seemingly living entity. In this way, and as he was to do with the churches of Gelmeroda and Vollersroda, the bridge over the Ilm became an architectonic expression of his own, often excited, mental state. It was a fugue-like crystallization of form centred on the outward expression of what he once described as an ‘ecstatic… magnetic cohesion’ between himself and the subject he was painting’ (Feininger, quoted in B. Haskell, Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World, New York, 2011, p. 51).