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Provenance: The Estate of Julia Feininger, New York.
Lafayette Parke Gallery, New York.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, New York, 11 May 1994, lot 45.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.
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Exhibited: New York, Acquavella Galleries and Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, Lyonel Feininger , October 1985-February 1986, no. 15 (illustrated in color).
Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and Munich, Haus der Kunst, Lyonel Feininger--von Gelmeroda nach Manhattan: Retrospektive der Gemälde , July 1998-January 1999, no. 4 (illustrated in color, p. 50).
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Notes: On occasion, Christie's has a direct financial interest in lots consigned for sale which may include guaranteeing a minimum price or making an advance to the consignor that is secured solely by consigned property. This is such a lot. This indicates both in cases where Christie's holds the financial interest on its own, and in cases where Christie's has financed all or a part of such interest through a third party. Such third parties generally benefit financially if a guaranteed lot is sold successfully and may incur a loss if the sale is not successful.
Achim Moeller will include this work in volume I of his forthcoming catalogue raisonné of paintings by Lyonel Feininger.
In 1905, Feininger met Julia Berg in Berlin, and their torrid affair--upon falling in love they would not separate and never returned to their spouses--would be an important catalyst for his breakthrough into painting. "For the first time in my life," Feininger breathlessly wrote to her, "I have not been taken to account why and for what reason the water is violet instead of blue !" (quoted in H. Hess, Lyonel Feininger , New York, 1961, p. 28). A young painter herself, Julia was the first to not question his "violet water," Feininger told her, recognizing her appreciation for what seemed a strange and revolutionary use of color in 1905, the year in which the strident colors of Expressionism were just being introduced by the "fauves" in France and by Die Brücke in Germany. Julia's encouragement was a revelation to Feininger, who was at age 34 beginning to contemplate freedom from the "serfdom of a caricaturist's life" (quoted in op. cit. , pp. 27-8).
Whatever Feininger's distaste for cartoon illustration, it was an assignment from the Chicago Tribune , contracting him to work from Europe, that allowed him to arrive with Julia in Paris on July 24, 1906. As a 1912 letter recounted, his stay in Paris was a turning point in his career: "Then suddenly came the liberation! A contract with Chicago made it possible to move to Paris, and at long last get to know the world of art! I could think, feel and work for myself ... Only during the last five years did I learn what art could and had to be for me! Since that time my awakening and development went quickly and strongly forward" (ibid., p. 38). If the "distortions and other traditional liberties of the cartoonist served as his pathway to the avant-garde of French painting," as Ernst Scheyer has observed," his finest work as a cartoonist dates to this period as well (in Lyonel Feininger: Caricature & Fantasy , Detroit, 1964, p. 103). Feininger became a critic of the contemporary scene in a series of caricatures published in the sophisticated Paris journal Le Témoin ("The Witness," i.e., to the mores of society), whose policies freed him from the constraints of illustrating the ideas of others by offering him the opportunity to create independent drawings. His achievement in graphic design carried over into his painting an education in social typology--epitomized by the poignant streetwalker L'Impatiente (La Belle) (fig. 1), fashionably clad with the smart elegance of her occupation--and an accomplished draftsmanship, fluent in the usage of strident colors, the distortions in size, and the shooting diagonals characteristic of caricature.
As Feininger began to apply his caricaturist's eye to the new medium of oil paint, he was encouraged and mentored by the German artists of the Matisse circle, whose informal meetings at the Café du Dôme whetted his intellectual appetite for modern art. The painter Oskar Moll, a fortuitous early acquaintance of 1906, was feeling his way beyond German Impressionism and, like Feininger, he was among the first pupils to study at the school directed by Matisse. Feininger later recounted that in 1907 he tried painting out of doors, often in St. Cloud and in the Luxemboug gardens, "in the manner of Monet and Liebermann under the guidance of Moll" (quoted in E. Scheyer, op. cit. , p. 98). This collective of German artists, which included Hans Purrmann, Rudolf Grossmann, Jules Pascin, Rudolf Levy, Wilhelm Uhde, and Richard Götz, brought conceptual clarity and new confidence to Feininger. They were the artists who would later be influential in introducing the art of the post-Impressionists--Cézanne, Van Gogh, and especially Matisse--to Germany. Feininger later reflected on his conversations with Götz, "I began to observe works of art and the paintings of the artists with whom I was acquainted in Paris (the Dôme group especially) began to acquire new meaning for me. Also the postulate that the artist should be an experimenter, seek out logical and constructive solutions--create synthetically pure forms" (in H. Hess, op. cit. , p. 32).
A signal event of Feininger's rapid growth as a painter was a show at Bernheim-Jeune Galleries in 1907, featuring works by Cézanne and Van Gogh, which he called a "revelation" (in E. Scheyer, op. cit. , p. 99). He borrowed from the latter a thick impasto and intense color, channeling a charged energy and restless feeling into six small oil paintings on board (fig. 2). Completed over the summer and fall of 1907, they demonstrate an easy command of the medium and free handling of paint. Yet what Feininger still had to overcome, as Hess observed, was his self-image as a caricaturist, an impasse at first evaded by painting still lifes and landscapes without figures, thus avoiding too direct a resemblance to his caricatures. The challenge was to find a painterly expression for his figures, and his "ideal" at that time, voiced in later writings, was "to build up pictures formed of silhouetted objects... I had seen shooting-gallery figures of cut sheet iron, and painted in a simple array of more or less violent colors, with no modeling" (in H. Hess, op. cit. , p. 43).
The great achievement of Die Werbung (The Proposal) was to successfully marry, for the first time, the modernist pictorial vocabulary of the Matisse circle with the stylized draftsmanship of his own original and idiosyncratic cartoon idiom. Feininger's application of color is as powerful as that of the Fauves, but his disharmonies are more strange and fantasist, dominated by strong blues and a rich range of mauvish-reds. "The slightest difference in relative proportions creates enormous differences with regard to the monumentality and intensity of the composition," Feininger wrote in a letter of 1906 (quoted in H. Hess, op. cit. , p. 18). Just one year later he deftly exploited this understanding, flattening the space in defiance of conventional perspective laws to enhance the grotesque oddity of the scene. There is a musicality in the composition, from the placement of figures not quite in correspondence with their perspective to the telling directions of their gazes, suggestive of much unspoken communication. The son of two concert performers and an accomplished violinist in his own right, Feininger explained in a letter to Alfred H. Barr, Jr., "Music has always been the first influence in my life... Polyphony, paired with delight in mechanical construction, went far to shape my creative bias" (quoted in A. H. Barr, Jr., Lyonel Feininger , exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1944, p. 7). Here, the polyphonic synthesis strikes high notes in the towering blue figure, whose flowing silhouette stretches the length of the canvas, in the exaggerated proportions and expression of the would-be "proposer" whom she dwarfs, and in the rhyming forms of the upper right hand corner, in which the decoration echoes and is brought onto the same plane as the women's hair dressings.
Die Werbung (The Proposal) is a defining painting from the beginning of Feininger's figurative period, which lasted until his subsequent encounter with Cubism and includes such other "grotesques" as the more sinister Jesuiten I (fig. 3) of the following year. It likely carried a personal significance to Feininger, who may have proposed to Julia around the time it was painted; they married on September 25, 1908. There is a sympathetic feeling to the lone male figure that makes one suspect that Feininger, a "tall, angular, and boyishly jerky man," (fig. 4) may have identified intimately with his subject (in H. Hess, op. cit. , p. 31).
Die Werbung (The Proposal) is one of the approximately fifty so-called "inaccessible" paintings that were left behind in Germany when the Feiningers fled the Third Reich in 1937. Entrusted to Hermann Klumpp, a young colleague, the paintings remained in East Germany until 1984 due to political complications and repeated breakdowns in communication with Klumpp. Their restitution was a diplomatic triumph and celebrated with the Exhibition Lyonel Feininger in 1985 at the Acquavella Galleries, New York and at the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
(fig. 1) Lyonel Feininger, L'Impatiente (La Belle) , 1907. From Le Témoin. BARCODE 26007120
(fig. 2) Lyonel Feininger, Steeple behind Trees , 1907. Private collection. BARCODE 26007113
(fig. 3) Lyonel Feininger, Jesuiten I , 1908. Sold, Christie's London, 17 October 2000, lot 5. BARCODE 26007182
(fig. 4) Lyonel Feininger in Graal on Rügen in 1905, photographed by Julia Feininger. BARCODE 26007106
