Die Regler Kirche, Erfurt

Artist Lyonel Feininger (American, 1871 - 1956)

Date1924

MediumCharcoal on buff paper

DimensionsUnframed: 12 1/8 × 10 1/16 inches (30.81 × 25.55 cm)

Credit LinePurchase: acquired through the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Milton McGreevy through the Westport Fund

Object number50-16/1

Signedlower border: Feininger Die Regler Kirche ERFURT 20. Sept. 1924

On View

Not on view

Collections

American Art

Terms

Exhibition History

Fine Arts Festival, Kansas State College, Manhattan, April 28-May 8, 1955.

Drawings: Collection of Milton McGreevy, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, March 7-April 4, 1965, no. 116.

Ross E. Taggart and George L. McKenna, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. 1, Art of the Occident, 5^th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 189.

City Views, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, May 31-July 10, 1983, no. 46B.

American Drawings and Watercolors from the Kansas City Region, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, July 19-September 6, 1992.

Gallery Label

Lyonel Feininger taught at the Bauhaus, a progressive art and design school in Weimar, Germany, from 1919 to 1925. During this period he frequently sketched in the nearby town of Erfurt. Erfurt's Regler Church, with its Baroque and Romanesque towers, is the subject of this important drawing, which, six years later, served as the basis for one of Feininger's largest paintings. The drawing relates very closely to the painting, not only in the architectural forms, but in the placement of Cubist-inspired ray lines. Although Feininger never completely dissolved his subjects into abstractions, he reinterpreted buildings like the Regler Church with a 20th-century vocabulary of fractured facets especially well-suited to conveying the mystery and spiritual nature of the sacred structure.

Provenance

With the artist and his wife, Julia Feininger (1880-1970), Berlin, New York and Falls River, CT, by May 12, 1950 [1];

Purchased from the artist, through Schaeffer Galleries, New York, by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1950.

NOTES:

[1] Getty Research Library, Los Angeles, CA, Schaeffer Galleries Records, Box 101, folder 3, Correspondence, 1950-F, copies in Nelson-Atkins curatorial file. An ‘X’ written in the lower left corner of the paper identifies this drawing as having been in the collection of the artist’s wife Julia, but correspondence regarding the sale was directed to Lyonel Feininger. For more about marginalia and inscriptions that appear on Feininger’s works on paper, see Leona E. Prasse, Lyonel Feininger: A Definitive Catalogue of the Graphic Work (Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1972), 32, 268-71.

Published References

Bulletin (The Nelson Gallery and Atkins Museum) vol. 4, no. 6 (1965): 52.

City Views, exh. cat. (Kansas City, MO: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1983), 16.

Henry Adams, et al., American Drawings and Watercolors from the Kansas City Region, exh. cat. (Kansas City, MO: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1992), 290-291, 354, (repro.).

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