Watercolor and India ink drawing
Signed lower left, dated "8.8.52" lower right. Titled on verso by a hand other than that of the artist. On laid paper. 31,4 x 48,4 cm (12,3 x 19 in), the full sheet

The work is registered in the archive of the Lyonel Feininger Project LLC, New York under the number 434-04-26-11. The photo expertise by Achim Moeller was not available before going to printing.

PROVENANCE: From the possession of Julia Feininger.
Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York.
Peale Hause Galleries, Pennsylvania.
Galerie Neher, Essen, 1987.
Private collection Rhineland.

EXHIBITION: Lyonel Feininger 1871 - 1956. Drawings and Watercolors, Marlborough Fine Art London Ltd., September - October 1968, cat. no. 50 (with illu. p. 36).

Lyonel Feiniger’s last years of artistic creation were coined by memories of his long stays in Germany. The old motifs reoccurring an often altered form. But the New York city landscape, which was the home of Feiniger in the last years of his life, was integrated into the artist’s circle of themes in a wondrous manner. There is hardly any oeuvre in the field of classic Modernism which is as self-contained as that of Lyonel Feininger. Which is why "Feel of Morning", void of any location, is much more obliged to Feininger’s canon of forms than a topographic determination. The sensitive stroke of the India ink brush outlines a silhouette of houses, tender and yet determined, and it gains an aura of a tempting distance through the soft, almost romantic watercolors. Feininger succeeds in transferring real-life experience into an almost dreamful atmosphere, questions regarding the here and now are secondary. His impressions come softly and yet they occupy all senses, both optical as well as emotional. In his landscapes, whether of the sea’s vastness or of the closeness of a Thuringian village, there often seems to be an air of musicality, an "andante cantabile", which slowly captivates the observer. [KD].