In Kurt Valentine’s New York gallery at the beginning of the 1950s there was an exhibition of the later work of Lyonel Feininger. I had always liked his work, but what struck me about this exhibition (Feininger was almost eighty at the time) was the spiritualization the artist had put into these pictures of entangled old housefronts or Baltic coastal scenes. You could hardly detect the subjects anymore. Whether it was the sky in one place or the sea in another, whether this was a sail and that a man—this had no importance because of the transparency of the surfaces. What was expressed here was the wisdom of an old artist, before whose gaze the world of objects had taken off its clothes. The creative void, a unity of nirvana inherent in, behind, and above everything—to this the artist had entrusted himself. It spoke out of his pictures. A voice, making a sound without words, at the limit between being and non-being. Here was a man still capable of saying something, yet so near to God.
I wrote to Feininger, whom I had known since the Bauhaus days, and I told him of my admiration, verging on amazement. We often spent time together. During the summer I met him at Joseph Albers’s house in New Haven and in his own home on 22nd Street in New York, where he used to cover countless small sheets of paper with colorful imps, such as had run around in his younger days in a more robust manner à la E. T. A. Hoffmann. These sheets, too, were haunted by this in-between sphere, between here and there, being and non-being. It is a rare gift of fate when an artist becomes more and more intense, more and more pure, as his life moves to its end.