Rain Cloud

Of German immigrant heritage, the American painter, printmaker, and draftsman Lyonel Feininger lived for more than half of his professional life in Germany, where he was associated with vanguard Expressionist and abstract art movements.  His intensely luminous paintings and watercolors were ordered, as in this work,by an underlying network of modulated, intersecting planes and grainy lines.  In these, he effectively coupled a penetrating vision of the contemporary worldcharacteristic of Cubism with expressionistic coloration. 

Feininger was a masterat the Bauhaus—Germany’s foremost art and design school during the turbulent Weimar Republic—from its founding in 1919 until the year before its forced closure by the Nazis in 1933.  In 1937, a month after heleft Germanypermanently for the United States, some of the artist’s works from German public collections were included in the first of the notorious Degenerate Art exhibitions. 

Along with views of medieval cities and landscapes, boats and marine imagery were constant and repeated motifs within Feininger’s art and central motifsin his iconography of an imagined golden past in 19th-century Biedermeier Germany.  The title of this watercolor, Rain Cloud, and the date of its execution (1939)suggest also the artist’s deepening concern over events in Europe and his beloved adopted country.