Untitled

The front of the sheet presents a playful grouping of four figures: a police officer caught in mid‑kick, a grumpy elderly man smoking a pipe, a woman in a black dress holding a blue fan, and a child in a green dress carrying a basket. The characters are rendered in a light‑hearted, cartoonish style, suggesting an early exploration of narrative illustration.

Feininger employs loose, gestural lines to define the figures, while modest applications of crayon and watercolor add selective color accents. The combination of media—ink for outlines, pencil for shading, and watercolor for washes—creates a spontaneous, sketch‑like quality typical of preparatory comic drafts.

The drawing is annotated as “first sketches for a comic series” and bears Feininger’s signature and date in the lower corner, confirming its origin as an early experiment in sequential art. It entered the Museum of Modern Art’s holdings through acquisition, though the precise path of ownership prior to the museum is not documented in the available records.

At the time of its creation, Feininger was still developing his artistic voice, later becoming known for his work in the Bauhaus and as a pioneering figure in modernist printmaking. These early cartoon sketches reveal his interest in popular visual culture and foreshadow his later engagement with graphic narrative forms.