82.24 Street in Treptow on the Rega (Strasse in Treptow am Rega)

1932

Watercolor, sheet: 12 1/2 x 9 3/4" (32 x 24.6 cm); composition: 10x 8 7/8" (25 x 20 cm)

Signed, ll: Feininger; lm:Strasse in Treptow am Rega; lr: 27.9.32

Provenance: Galerie Voemel, Dusseldorf, 1952

Always attracted to seaside locations, Feininger visited Treptow (today the Polish town of Trzebiatów) and the neighboring coastal village Deep (now Czajcze) for the first time in 1912. On the Pomeranian coast so beloved by many of the Expressionist artists, Deep became Feininger’s favored summer residence from 1924 until his return to America in 1936; he was, in fact, in Deep when he learned of the closing of the Bauhaus and of his status as a “degenerate” artist.

In 1932, the artist, joined by his sons, spent the entire summer–from May 13 to September 30–in West Deep and Treptow. In the letters he wrote daily to his wife Julia while there, one gains an understanding of the artistic inspiration Feininger found near the sea:

“If I could only convey to you some of the peace, the happiness, which blessedly surrounds me here in little Deep! For one thing, there is a brilliant sun, in a sky of painted colin-blue! A gentle breeze from the sea, cool and pure...You know: sunshine; the shimmer on wet streets; gentle moon-shine; the shimmer of gold and silver in my own pepper-and-salt eyebrows; sunshine that spreads across the colorfulness of the landscape–all of this shining is for me the greatest beauty and happiness.”

This watercolor of a rain-covered street in Treptow is characteristic of Feininger’s “shimmering” style, which his concentration on the prismatic intersection of color and architectural forms. Despite Feininger’s obvious devotion to direct observation, he never painted his works outdoors, but completed everything in the studio. There he was free to transpose and clarify his impressions from nature. He painted several versions of the streets of Treptow, both in oil and watercolor, as was his practice at the time; other versions appeared in exhibitions in Berlin and elsewhere in the 1920s. This particular work was a gift to his nephew Kasio sent to him at Christmas 1935.

Before settling at Deep on the Pomeranian coast for his summer residence, Feininger visited Eutin, a small town in Schleswig-Holstein 17 miles northwest of Lübeck. There he concentrated on one of his favored themes, churches with spiraled steeples. This particular scene–numbered because it was part of a series of similar views inspired by the same location–appeared in the exhibition of the Gesellschaft der Freunde der jungen Kunst (Society of Friends of New Art) in nearby Braunschweig in the spring of 1926. Here one sees Feininger’s sublimation of color to graphic line; the muted shades of blue and gray allude to the idea of prismatic color and atmospheric reflections that so fascinated Feininger throughout his life.