Feininger spent his boyhood practicing the violin with intent to follow in his family’s musical footsteps. At 16, he moved from New York to Germany to train professionally, but after learning his would-be professor was out of the country he drifted towards studying visual art. During a trip to Paris in 1911, Feininger was introduced to the Cubist pictorial style, which inspired the artist to compose his landscape and architectural pictures from fractured planes and prismatic rays. Music, however, remained a steady influence throughout his life.

          In Veiled Sunset, Feininger composed a landscape from subtle areas of translucent watercolor, semitransparent planes that build the picture’s background, and groups of lines that create a sense of architecture. These characteristics strongly point towards Feininger’s interest in the Cubist style, but as one art historian noted it also speaks to his passion for symphonic sound, as the lines in particular are “placed and spaced as particularly as notes, and each line has its full value.”

October, 2020