I am pleased to highlight Pine Woods (Edge of the Woods), 1928, an outstanding painting of a staggered row of cedar trees by Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956). The work has been in the Feininger family collection and is now available for the first time.

On July 3, 1919, shortly after Feininger was appointed as a master at the Bauhaus in Weimar, he took a trip with his colleagues Walther Klemm and Richard Engelmann to the nearby village of Buchfart. On the way, they passed a row of cedars. The trees captured Feininger’s attention, and he recorded them in a quick sketch.

Nine years later, the artist revisited his sketch from that day. In his studio in his master house in Dessau (where the Bauhaus had relocated in 1925), he began to paint Pine Woods (Edge of the Woods), filling the canvas with mottled brown trunks topped with angular, dark-green pine branches. As Hans Hess described the composition in his biography of the artist, the “trees alone serve as architectural elements for the creation of the structure of space and light.”

Visit Artist Page

--
Achim Moeller