5 - 9 - 19, these are the three lucky numbers in the life of the American artist Lyonel Feininger.

In 1905, on a train heading for the Baltic Sea, he met the painter Julia Berg, the love of his life.

From 1909 he became a member of the Berlin Secession, which led to his rapid fame in “cubist” circles.

And in 1919 he became one of the formative professors of the newly founded “Bauhaus” in Weimar.

One would think it was an arrow-straight career, which can still be seen in paintings in all of the world's great museums.

But behind every canvas, every drawing, there was always massive self-doubt.

Stefan Trinks

Editor in the features section.

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Because in the degree of contrite self-criticism the brilliant draftsman Feininger and his second wife gave each other nothing, as his letters to them, now published under the title “Darling, it's all stormy days”, indicate.

Even after the first major sales in the turbulently successful year of the Secession, 1909, he wrote to Julia on August 15th: "You complain about your work that it seems so wrong now, that's exactly how it is for me."

There really had to be a storm “every day” in both artists' lives in order to make life in the pictures all the more swirling.

Reed lighthouses

The dramatic metaphor of the storm - be it from Shakespeare, be it from Giorgione in the eponymous renaissance picture "Tempesta" - was obviously close to Feininger, who was born in New York in 1871. As a boy he often stood with his ship models on the windy piers of the most European city in America, which in his childhood was just going through its metamorphosis into the city of sky-towering skyscrapers. If these are essentially about transposing the family towers and cathedrals of old Europe, Feininger remains lifelong loyal to the idea of ​​the tower that spiritually connects earth and sky.

During later stays on the island of Usedom (for example in Neppermin, which he renamed “Never mind” as he so often mixed language) and elsewhere on the Baltic Sea coast, Feininger painted and drew many thin, reed lighthouses, which are colored to counter the storm wind. His impressionist-cubist series of the church tower in Gelmeroda or the market church in Halle during the years at the Bauhaus testify to this built hope that something man-made could defy all the storms of life. But what are role models that he does not believe he is doing justice to? In September 1920 he describes the pictures of the forefathers of his own generation, Marées and Böcklin, as "built wrongly" and not "felt" by the artists. On the other hand, he names Bach, Dürer and Grünewald as his household gods,The former is also often played by the son of two musicians who are enthusiastic about joints.

The long 'unlucky streak' in my painting

It is not an exaggeration to state that thirty years of contemporary history from a male-female double perspective can be found in this edition of the letters. Not from a historian's point of view, nor from a particularly extreme political point of view, as would have been easily expected in the first third of the twentieth century. Rather, two, actually four artist eyes - because Feininger tries to look at things from the position of his wife - at the world. Unfortunately, after the death of her husband in 1956, Julia only collected his letters in a typescript, so that her answers are missing today, as are some of the intimate parts of the almost three hundred letters that have survived. But Feininger owes her a lot,because, in addition to keeping free for art, from 1905 onwards his wife had initiated him into the various printing techniques with which he was to become famous.