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Lot 33
Theodore Lux Feininger(1910-2011)The Yawl Milky Way
26 September – 7 October 2025, 12:00 EDT
Skinner Marlborough, MassachusettsSold for US$2,560 inc. premium
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Jelena James
Senior Specialist, Head of Sale
Claire Dettelbach
Cataloguer
Jewel Bernier
Cataloguer
Theodore Lux Feininger (1910-2011)
The Yawl Milky Way
signed 'Theodore Lux.' (upper right); titled, inscribed, and signed or inscribed '"Milky Way" / S.S. Crocker des. / Th. Lux 1941' (by hand on the reverse); with a fragmentary loan label from the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge (affixed to the stretcher)
oil on canvas
18 x 28 in. (45.7 x 71.1 cm)
Painted in 1941.
signed 'Theodore Lux.' (upper right); titled, inscribed, and signed or inscribed '"Milky Way" / S.S. Crocker des. / Th. Lux 1941' (by hand on the reverse); with a fragmentary loan label from the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Cambridge (affixed to the stretcher)
oil on canvas
18 x 28 in. (45.7 x 71.1 cm)
Painted in 1941.
Footnotes
Provenance
Eric Schroeder, Boston, Massachusetts (acquired directly from the artist).
Donald Starr, Boston, Massachusetts (acquired from the previous, 1941).
The present private Massachusetts collection.
Exhibited
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Art Museums/Busch-Reisinger Museum, T. Lux Feininger Retrospective Exhibition: Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors, February 19-March 24, 1962, no. 14.
N.B.
Feininger was born Theodore Lukas Feininger in Berlin, Germany. He was a student at the Bauhaus in Dessau in the 1920s and participated in a wide array of artistic exploits, including painting, working as a photojournalist, playing jazz music, and acting in experimental theater. By 1929 he had shifted primarily to painting, taking on the pseudonym 'Theodore Lux' to differentiate himself from his father, the painter Lyonel Feininger. He worked in Paris in the early 1930s before emigrating to New York City in 1936 after he, along with many other Bauhaus artists, became targeted by the Nazis. Feininger left most of his photographic negatives behind in Germany; these have never been recovered, and by 1953 Feininger had completely abandoned photography as a medium. After working in intelligence for the army during World War II, Feininger continued painting in New York and Boston. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at age 101.
'The Yawl Milky Way' depicts the yacht of Boston-based lawyer Donald Starr (1901-1992), a portrait of whom hangs at the Boston Athenaeum (UR279). (Starr was also the husband of well-known Boston artist Polly Thayer). This work was painted in Cambridge in December 1941, on the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack, as recorded by Feininger himself: '[Eric Schroeder] had arranged for my being asked to paint a portrait of the yacht of a Boston friend and invited me to stay at the Schroeder house in Cambridge... The portrait of Mr. Donald Starr's yacht "Milky Way" was done and left to dry, ... when [we] on the way to Lincoln where we were expected for drinks at Gropius' house. The country had been at peace when we left Follen Street... but the war began while we were driving towards our destination and on the doorstep of the house we were met with the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor going on at this time.'
The present work is listed in the online catalogue raisonné of Theodore Lux Feininger's work at https://www.kunst-archive.net/en/wvz/t_lux_feininger/works/die_jolle_milky_way/type/all.