Lot 20 N

Featuring three model locomotives, a model train and six technical drawings connected with them, an ensemble of works by Lyonel Feininger that is extremely rare on the art market is coming up for auction. These are some of the few extant examples of the prototypes for wooden trains he built around 1913: they were to be produced by the Munich toy manufacturer Otto Löwenstein on behalf of the artist. Although Feininger had already applied for the patent for his “Blockeisenbahn” and preparations had been made for its manufacture – its cardboard packaging had even been designed – industrial production had to be stopped because of the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914.
Feininger had been fascinated by trains and the dynamism associated with them since his childhood. In the early years of his life in New York, he experienced the rush of Grand Central Station, which opened the year he was born, the building of the elevated line above Second Avenue and the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. Above all, however, the big steam engines fascinated him as the epitome of the achievements of modern engineering: “I often stood”, he writes in an autobiographical account, “on one of the long pedestrian bridges along 4th Avenue, which lead over the tracks of the New York Central Railway, and watched the arriving and departing trains” (cited in Martin Faass, Eine Phantasiewelt parallel zur Kunst Lyonel Feiningers Spielzeug, in: Jahrbuch des Museums für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, vol. 20, 2001, p. 116). With great interest in all things technological, Feininger developed an enthusiasm for old-fashioned steam locomotives while he was still in the US, repeatedly drawing, sometimes painting and even reconstructing them in wood.
Having already carved houses, churches, town gates and figures for his three sons, he developed prototypes for model trains for the toy industry around 1913. This was before his artistic breakthrough, and Feininger hoped to generate another source of income for himself in this way. As explained by Martin Faass, he invented the category of the “Blockeisenbahn”: a wooden train without wheels and tracks, which was simply pulled along the floor on its smooth underside. He greatly enjoyed creating the precisely detailed technical drawings of historical locomotives with their tenders and carriages that he made in preparation. The “Adler” built by Robert Stephenson in England and the American “Pacific” served as models. He had a friend, who was a woodworker, produce the parts for the prototypes, which Feininger then assembled and painted himself (cf. Faass, ibid., p. 116). All of these represent historical trains since Feininger’s affinity for technology – unlike that of the futurists – was not associated with a faith in progress. But he nonetheless demonstrated himself to be an expert who was well-versed in his material, and he displayed extreme technical precision in his assembly drawings, for example, for the “Amerikanischer Personen-D-Wagen ‘1915’”. As he wrote to his wife Julia on 26 May 1913, he was enthusiastically working away: “I am diligently working on the models and am building very clever things and very carefully thought through in every part […]. Doing this work, I’m the happy 15-year-old boy again, and now it has a purpose on top of all that” (cited in T. Lux Feininger, Die Stadt am Ende der Welt, München 1965, p. 28). He also saw the usefulness of these designs, looking ahead to the plans for their production: “And nonetheless with a cheerful subconscious sense of making something like a work that will soon be visible to hundreds of thousands and genuinely pleasing – not like ‘shoddy oil paintings’” (cited in T. Lux Feininger, ibid., p. 30).
The works also possess outstanding provenances and were formerly owned by the eldest son, Andreas Feininger, or come from the collection of museum professional and friend Alois J. Schardt. Schardt, who was director of Halle’s municipal art museum from 1926, organised Feininger’s first important commission: the creation of a series of paintings of Halle’s Marktkirche (1929-1931).