Alt Sallenthin (III)

Alt-Sallenthin is a small village on the Baltic island of Usedom, where Lyonel Feininger and his family spent many summers from 1909 onwards. The present work was created shortly after a major breakthrough in Feininger’s style, which came during his two-week vacation with Walter Gropius and Wassily Kandinsky to the sea town of Timmendorf in August 1922. The harmonious connection Feininger experienced with the beautiful marine landscape rejuvenated him, and he began producing paintings that were inspired by the Baltic Coast: crystalline in essence and illuminated by an inner radiance, seemingly infused with air. As Barbara Haskell notes, Feininger applied his pigments ‘in thin layers, which he washed with turpentine to reveal under-layers of paint’, endowing his canvasses with ‘a chromatically modulated, radiant softness’. (B. Haskell, ed. Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World, exh. cat., New York, 2011, p. 101). Created at a time when Feininger was actively experimenting with music at the Bauhaus, his light-infused seascapes were shaped by his engagement with musical structure, particularly his exploration of polyphonic and multipart harmonies. In Alt-Sallenthin, this musical sensibility manifests in the overlapping colour planes, whose geometric faceting creates a layered visual structure that echoes the contrapuntal sounds of polyphonic harmony.

Created during his time teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar, the painting dates to a productive and formative period for Feininger, when he exchanged ideas and engaged in steady dialogue with like-minded avant-garde peers. As an American émigré in Germany, Feininger found his early experiences at the Bauhaus invigorating and intellectually stimulating. Indeed, he was the first to accept the offer to become a ‘master’ at the Bauhaus, becoming the school’s very first appointed teacher. As Hans Hess observed, Bauhaus Modernists ‘had great hopes, great plans, and great people’, sharing a vision of the regeneration of cultural life (H. Hess, Lyonel Feininger, London, 1961, p. 87). The founding of the Bauhaus ‘was in intention a moral act, a step in the reformation of society through the unity of the arts and the technics, culminating in architecture’ (ibid., p. 87).

Feininger was particularly receptive to this ideal of artistic regeneration. The early Bauhaus vision carried a utopian nostalgia for the medieval workshop, imagining a creative Gemeinschaft, or community, in which different artistic disciplines could exist in dialogue with one another. Within this experimental and collaborative environment, Feininger maintained a distinctive artistic identity. Although elements of his style can be traced to Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism, he remained a self-contained artist, resisting easy categorisation. He eventually rejected the symbiosis between art and modern technology championed by some of his peers, maintaining instead the importance of spirituality to his practice. Fellow Bauhaus Master Georg Muche (1895-1987) expressed: ‘In the Bauhaus, Feininger was an example of the mysterious workings of a man who creates quietly from the depths, of an artist who is at peace with himself and radiates…’ (Georg Muche, quoted in B. Haskell, ed. Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World, exh. cat., New York, 2011, p. 96).

Feininger was preoccupied with light as a force, considering light ‘the ordering principle of the world’ (ibid., p. 231). He saw it a source of clarity amid chaos, and through his art he sought to make visible a sense of the divine within the secular world. Feininger firmly saw himself within the German Romanticist tradition, using landscape painting not only to reveal the tangible world, but also the inner sublime. In Alt-Sallenthin, Feininger lovingly portrays a town he repeatedly returned to with his family for respite, capturing the transcendental qualities the place surely carried for him. Indeed, the significance of Alt Sallenthin (III) to Feininger’s practice is evidence by the fact it was one of the works selected by the artist to include in the legendary 1929 Blaue Vier (Blue Four) exhibition at Berlin’s Galerie Ferdinand Möller, a seminal exhibition which brought together the work of Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Alexej von Jawlensky. An earlier painting of Alt-Sallenthin from 1912 adopts a more angular, Expressionist approach, characteristic of his early practice. The present work, by contrast, feels more accomplished and resolved: its simpler, more distinct planes allow the houses and the glimmering seaside landscape to appear almost translucent, as though animated by a radiant inner light. Ultimately, the composition traverses the boundary between abstraction and figuration: the distinct physical character of the town remains recognisable, but its spiritual reality seems to give way to something more elusive.