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1871-1956
KLEINSTADT (TOWN)

measurements
36 by 33.4cm.

alternate measurements
14 1/8 by 13 1/8 in.

Painted in 1910.

signed Feininger and dated 10 (upper right)

oil on canvas

To be included in the Lyonel Feininger Catalogue Raisonné being prepared by Achim Moeller.

PROVENANCE

Erna and Arno Wittgensteiner, Berlin (possibly acquired directly from the artist in the 1920s; until 1939)
Restituted to the heir of Erna and Arno Wittgensteiner in the late 1950s
Thence by descent to the present owner

LITERATURE

Hans Hess, Lyonel Feininger, London, 1961, no. 58

NOTE

Painted in 1910, Kleinstadt is an important figural composition from a period in Feininger's career when the artist was at the height of its Expressionist style. Feininger frequently depicts figures in his characteristic comic and whimsical street scenes, and here they walk towards the viewer with their fashionable hats and canes.

However, there is a more complex undercurrent in the artist's street scenes from this period than the bright colouration and bourgeois gentility would at first suggest. Writing of this crucial period in Feininger's artistic development, Ulrich Luckhardt commented: 'Feininger depicts three stages of normal, middle-class life before the revolt. The city at the end of the world, in which all this is played out, is the synonym for the deceptive security of a world shutting its eyes to the realities of pre-revolutionary society in Germany -- a fairytale scene, taken from the Nineteenth Century, the structures which, as Feininger sees it, cannot survive. For him the figures in this seemingly whole and sane world are only performing a charade.

'It is the 'terrible cheerfulness' of the revolt that grips Feininger's 'city at the end of the world.' Uproar and revolution have seized the bourgeois world. The world of his 'masquerades' -- paintings and drawings made between now and 1911 -- is a scenario of the weirdest types and grotesque figures, formed into ever new groupings, seemingly irreconcilable with reality. In this scenario its logical conclusion is that his cartoon figures have become independent' (Ulrich Luckhardt, Lyonel Feininger, Munich, 1989, p. 25). The present work is a jewel-like example of Feininger's individual, almost cynical approach to the world.