These small figures blend into the space of the vague and paradoxical small town, a fanciful reinvention of specific places like Longeuil in Normandy and Gelmeroda near Weimar. 

Introducing himself as “Roman- Latin-German-American” thanks to his family origins, the son of the violinist and composer Karl and the singer Elizabeth Lutz, Lyonel Charles Feininger always asserted his cosmopolitanism. On moving to Hamburg in 1887 after learning his craft to brilliant effect in Berlin and Paris, he gained a certain renown in the 1890s as a caricaturist for German satirical magazines like Ulk and Lustige Blätter, and then as a cartoonist for the Chicago Sunday Tribune. The important period spent in Paris from 1906 to 1908 saw a crucial switch to oil painting. In letters of the time to his wife Julia, Feininger disowned his previous graphic works and admitted to considering himself a novice in art despite being thirty-six. 

As a painter, he formed part of the Berliner Sezession from 1909. His first solo exhibition was held at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin and Feininger would come into contact with the Cubists and with the Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter painters. In 1919 he was called as a Master of Graphic Arts to Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus, where he taught alongside Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee until 1926. Together with the latter and Alexej von Jawlensky, he would also found the Die Blaue Vier (The Four Blues) group in 1924 and would establish himself as one of the masters of Modernism. 

The studies of Ulrich Luckhardt prompted reappraisal of Feininger’s cartoons also in relation to his early painting, which is generally described as Expressionistic, the phase to which Kleinstadt (Small Town, 1910) belongs. As in his political caricatures, from which the paintings are often directly drawn, Feininger subjects bourgeois life to the distorting cynicism of irony. His grotesque passers-by in the ostentatious elegance of hooped skirts, walking sticks and tall top hats are based on sketches from life. These small figures blend into the space of the vague and paradoxical small town, a fanciful reinvention of specific places like Longeuil in Normandy and Gelmeroda near Weimar. Luckhardt points out the political message inherent in these apparently tranquil slices of life, from the unreal solitude of his City at the Edge of the World (1910) to the agitation of the contemporary scenes of carnival festivities and rioting. He also pinpoints the artist’s source for the subject of social rebellion in the novels of Victor Hugo he so loved, which would also explain the vaguely anachronistic clothing of the figures. Feininger’s closeness to Expressionism until 1912, when he took up a highly personal and very sophisticated form of Cubism with planes developed in chiaroscuro, can be seen in the use of unnatural colours and off-kilter urban views. While the German Expressionists with whom he frequented the Café du Dôme during his stay in Paris were influenced by Henri Matisse, his own rich application of paint and use of colours like yellow and aquamarine in Kleinstadt derive rather from close study of Vincent van Gogh, whose popularity in Germany was then at its peak. It was precisely in 1910 that Julius Meier-Graefe’s major study of Van Gogh was published in Berlin and a major retrospective with fifty-two works was organised by the Paul Cassirer gallery in October. Painted in Feininger’s studio in the Zehlendorf district of Berlin, Kleinstadt entered the collection of Arno and Erna Wittgensteiner, possibly in the late 1920s. Born at Krefeld in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1883, Arno Wittgensteiner arrived in Berlin in 1912 to work as a lawyer for the Lindemann furniture company. After marrying Erna Lindemann and the birth of their first child in 1913, Wittgensteiner went on to pursue a brilliant career in law in Spandau and Hamburg, residing in Potsdam and Berlin during the 1920s. Being of Jewish origin, he resigned from the board of the Karstadt company in Hamburg when the Nazi party came to power in 1933 and was soon forced to sell his home. Feininger emigrated to the United States in 1937 and in 1939 Kleinstadt was one of the many works of his confiscated by the Nazi government from museums and private collections, and in some cases destroyed, as examples of entartete Kunst or “degenerate art”. The Wittgensteiners moved to Australia, and the painting was returned to their heirs in the late 1950s. It remained in their possession until 2006, when it was auctioned and bought by Cerruti. 

Filippo Bosco