Lyonel Feininger on the Rocks.

The Ruins by the Sea: A case study in Feininger's practice.

At the top of the hill was a derelict Victorian mansion, and though New Haven is chock-a-block with haunted-looking buildings, this slouching wreck captivated my seven-year-old mind completely. Its mansard roof sagged, the boards over the windows fell away leaving squinting windows, and the certainty that this was a place of dark magicks was completed by the fact that it stood alone and empty on prime real estate on the main drag in a leafy New England college town.¹

What strange people had consecrated this place with their weird geomancy? Why had they left? The very existence of the ruined building demanded analysis. Not actual digging—my siblings and I were regularly subjected to historical tours of New Haven and we had many opportunities to find out exactly who had built it and why they’d left—but this wasn’t the analysis wrecks and ruins call for. We stared at it for hours, swelling it in every dimension, a place out of time and space.

Ruins have this effect, warbling history from its steady track. People lived here—apparently powerful enough to raise this temple, to craft an eery Victorian Mansion, to stack these stones in a circle—and that they don’t any more insinuates a hidden knowledge. They knew something we don’t, and they took that knowledge with them when they left.

Spooky season is on, but for some, it never ends. That’s the signpost up ahead, your next stop: the last days of the Weimar Republic.

II. Nothing is quite definite.

Lyonel Feininger was walking on a desolate Baltic beach in 1928 when he found his own haunted wreck. Feininger had abandoned his role as pioneer of the modern comic strip for a career as a fine artist in 1907,² but by the 1920s, the life he had made in Germany began to quake with new uncertainties.

“My American childhood had got me and I became acutely conscious of the poisonous atmosphere in which one is living here and that I too am a free American and the country across the ocean still my own land.”³

The poisons were numerous—the nightmare of World War I, a reeling economy, the rise of fascism, the sense that the libertine days of the Weimar Republic couldn’t go on forever—and when the artist, walking on a cold northern beach near the village of Hoff, came across the ruins of a Gothic church, he found solace in the power of its mystery.

“The coast is high and steep, beautifully vast in lines, but large stretches are crumbling away, for the rains have caused landslides. Far away, at the highest and steepest point stood something puzzling, a bulky cube which might have been a fort but, in fact, was quite some thing else. There on top of the edge of the precipice, and without a doubt doomed to perdition, stood the ruins of a church. I was completely mystified. . . Successively as we approached, apertures revealed buttresses, and at last a row of beautifully shaped arched window-openings in the Gothic style came into view.”⁴

The ruins, like a haunted mansion on a hill, required analysis—and Feininger pursued it for the remainder of his time in Germany. That analysis took the form of works in many media. This was a magical place, and the mystery of its power wasn’t one that needed to be solved, but to be coaxed into the world. Feininger’s first batch of a dozen drawings were made on site. They are simple enough landscapes—outlines of the masses of forms, notations of horizon and sea. But as he moved from drawings to etchings, he carved away at details that identified scale and place, filling out the composition with his characteristic rays of arbitrary geometric lines. These paper investigations guided him towards oil paintings in his studio—some of them executed a decade later and thousands of miles from Hoff.

“In the medium of charcoal I have discovered a great relationship with pure painting. Jotting down one’s first nebulous, chaotic conceptions, one gradually can work. . . through to firm ground and precise form. That which has been halfway indicated is open to further evolution. Nothing is quite definite until it has reached final clarity in the finished painting in oil.”⁵

The hulking wreck of the ancient church bespeaks a mystery and power that a photograph or a blueprint or an archive of the letters of the church’s designers never could.

And we know that they couldn’t, because we have them.