Even as a child in New York, Feininger was drawn to the water—only a block separated his family home from the East River, with its many piers and landing stages. At the mouth of the Hudson River in New York Harbor, too, he stood in wonder and soon found himself sketching elegant sailing ships, old barges, and modern steamships. He built his own model boats, immersed himself in questions of construction, and remained throughout his life an avid reader of maritime journals.

Yet this technical knowledge plays a small part in the maritime subjects of his painting, as 'Ships and Red Sun' of 1924 demonstrates: the vessel in the background—clearly a steamship with a delicate plume of smoke—appears as a distant silhouette, while the ship in the foreground, with its sails, lies within a field in which sky and sea merge without a clear horizon. This impression is intensified by a small, orange-red sun. Through its distinct form and strict vertical “reflection,” it detaches itself from naturalism and becomes a sign-like, almost figurative counterpart to the ships. The shape of their sails is echoed in the foreground by a slender post with a light cloth, which at the same time anchors the viewer’s gaze at the shore.

By allowing sky and sea to flow into one another, Feininger dissolves classical spatial depth. Foreground, middle ground, and background lose their hierarchy; a diffuse light levels the space. What emerges is a sense of vastness, yet without depth, as the pictorial field unfolds in a markedly planar way.

During his stays on the Baltic coast, Lyonel Feininger absorbed the unique atmosphere – swimming, walking along the shore, and, again and again, drawing. Only later did he develop these motifs into his seascapes in the studio. From 1919 onwards, he was active at the Bauhaus in Weimar, though he increasingly withdrew from teaching in order to devote himself entirely to his own painting. His marine subjects are both carefully constructed and deeply felt. Perhaps it is precisely here that their particular quality lies: in the conjunction of a reduced, analytical formal language with a profound, restrained longing for the sea.