Rainy Day on the Beach (Regentag am Strande) 1918

Lyonel Feininger made this woodcut, Rainy Day on the Beach, with just the simplest of tools, and with a real sense of the process of cutting and printing the block. There’s something elemental about the contrasts here, black and white, light and shadow, the hard, sharp lines, and the soft give of the figures. It's like a study in pure form. I can almost feel the roughness of the wood, the deliberate marks left by the artist’s hand. Look at those heavy, black, diagonal lines at the top, indicating the rain – they’re so bold. They make the whole scene feel weighted down. Then there’s the negative space, the white areas that create these figures. It's all about that push and pull, that tension between what’s there and what isn’t. Feininger was part of the Bauhaus movement, and you can see that shared interest in simplification and geometry here. Maybe he and someone like Paul Klee were having a conversation across time, a back and forth, about how to pare things down to their essence. Art is an ongoing dialogue, a constant reimagining.