"Am Bahndamm" (‘By the Railway Embankment’) Lyonel Feininger

• The motif of trains recurs throughout Feininger’s oeuvre; he had a particular fascination with them • Feininger renders his expressive landscape using only shades of brown • The precise dating down to the day testifies to Feininger’s meticulous working process The railway motif runs through Feininger’s work: even as a teenager, he was fascinated by trains and drew them time and again. In New York, he was able to observe the steam locomotives at Grand Central and would remain captivated by them throughout his life. In 1913–14, whilst Feininger was already living in Germany, he designed wooden toys in a railway theme. In the decades that followed during his artistic career, he returned to this theme time and again, with his memories permeating these images; the trains and locomotives depicted are – despite his modern and dynamic visual language – often the machines of his childhood. On 26 September 1916, during the First World War, Feininger created ‘Am Bahndamm’, a work that stands out from his series of train paintings: rendered in shades of brown using ink and watercolour, it depicts a small settlement beside a massive railway embankment, which not only borders the settlement but also cuts through and separates both the pictorial space and the landscape. Here, the artist focuses not on the trains themselves, but on the necessary infrastructure and its impact on the environment. Infrastructure which certainly came to the fore not least due to the movement of troops during the war, and which permanently altered and shaped the landscape. In this way, Feininger succeeds in making the ‘railway’ as such the subject of his work, even in the absence of a railway line itself. | 1871 - New York - 1956 | Moderne Kunst | Arbeiten auf Papier | Nummer: 26x2446 | Provenance: Allan Frumkin Gallery, New York; Serge Sabarsky Gallery, New York; Antonio Gebauer, New York; Sammlung/Nachlass Serge Sabarsky, New York; Sammlung/Stiftung Vally Sabarsky, New York.

Estimate:£15,020.37

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