Lyonel Feininger Woodcuts

In the early part of 1918, Lyonel Feininger started creating woodcuts. He took a trip with his family to the charming town of Braunlage in the Harz Mountains during the summer of that year. He was inspired to work on his new media by the bucolic surroundings.

 

 

The magnificent spruce trees in the Harz Mountains served as Feininger’s inspiration, but his subjects also came from his imagination and drawings his kids drew. He created innovative drawings of ships, railroads, and hunting lodges while he practised for his woodcuts on a sketchpad. Because Feininger was so confident in these compositions, he immediately began carving several of their motifs into wooden blocks. He had impressively finished 117 woodblocks by the end of 1918.

 

 

Feininger conveyed his ardent preoccupation with the medium in a letter to his friend, Alfred Kubin, in March 1919, writing, “I have hardly painted at all, nor made any drawings. The only thing I have done is take up woodcuts….This technique gives me so much pleasure and I just dropped everything else. But now it’s time for me to move forward enthusiastically with painting!”

Feininger was able to return to painting and drawing with renewed zest thanks in large part to this focused phase of making woodcuts. His involvement with woodcuts constituted an important development in his artistic practise and assisted him in figuring out challenging aesthetic issues.

 

 

Woodcuts by Lyonel Feininger commonly have numbers in the bottom centre. His numbering method uses the last one to two numbers to keep track of how many woodcuts he produced in a particular year, with the first two digits indicating the year he made the print. For instance, the numbers “184” and “1829” denote the fourth and the twenty ninth woodcuts, respectively, that Feininger produced in 1918.

View more Lyonel Feininger woodcuts here.