Dear Friends,

On the occasion of Lyonel Feininger. Retrospective, a major retrospective of the artist’s wide-ranging work at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt organized in cooperation with Moeller Fine Art Projects | The Lyonel Feininger Project, we offer a companion online exhibition focused on Lyonel Feininger’s (1871–1956) remarkable drawings and watercolors. Our exhibition, A Voyage through Artistic Ingenuity: Drawings and Watercolors by Lyonel Feininger, 1908–1955, features 33 works, beginning with the first watercolors he made in 1908 in Paris, shortly after he decided to become an independent artist, and including his last works, made in New York in 1955.

These drawings and watercolors take us on a voyage through six decades of Feininger’s artistic ingenuity and the settings that inspired him along the way. They show the Parisian streets he walked as a young artist reveling in the city, its powerful art and architecture, and, as he expressed, the freedom he felt there: “For the first time I could think and feel for myself and work.” They depict the train tracks near his home in Berlin-Zehlendorf, where he lived with his wife, Julia, and their three sons for more than a decade, and where he experienced his artistic breakthrough. They show the charming villages around Weimar, where Feininger moved in 1919 to start his position as the first master at the Bauhaus. They take viewers to the Baltic Sea, with its sunsets and sailboats, during his summer visits and then back to his natal Manhattan and its commanding skyscrapers, after the Nazis made life in Germany impossible for Feininger and his family. We end with a small selection of "Ghosties," charming little drawings that he made for his family and friends during the last decade of his life.

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