Homecoming, Sailing Boats II (Einfahrend Segler II)

Of German immigrant heritage, the American Lyonel Feininger lived for more than half of his professional life in Germany, where he was associated with vanguard Expressionist and abstract art movements. Boats and marine imagery recurred often within Feininger’s art, where they acted as central motifs in his iconography of an imagined golden past in Biedermeier Germany. This ideal was fostered by Feininger’s childhood memories of his parents’ recollections of the mid-nineteenth-century German art and culture they had left behind to relocate to the United States.