Lyonel Feininger’s best-known images – scenes of delicately faceted sailboats and buildings – evoke an otherworldly nostalgia. Yet he cut his artistic teeth on an entirely different kind of imagery: the grotesque descriptions and biting humor of the comic strips he produced at the turn of the century as Germany’s pre-eminent political cartoonist.

Over the course of his career, Feininger (1871-1956) would be by turns a painter, printmaker, and caricaturist. The influence of all these forms is evident in the retrospective of nearly 60 works on paper currently being held at Achim Moeller, but the drawings, woodcuts, and watercolors in the show concentrate above all on his “natur-notizen,” the “notes from nature” with which he filled the small sketchbooks he habitually carried with him in the years before World War I. These sketches were intended as preparatory studies, though many of them are remarkably complete and satisfying in their own right, often surpassing his later paintings in their immediacy of observation and technique. They offer, moreover, tantalizing clues about the attitude underlying all his work.

Born and raised in New York City, Feininger was sent to Germany at age 16 to study music, and decided to enroll in art school instead. He wound up living in Germany for 50 years, during which time he exhibited with the Blaue Reiter group and served as a founding teacher at the Bauhaus. But he always considered himself an American.

Two drawings here, competent but unremarkable renderings from the early 1890s, show the first results of his schooling. Likewise, there is only one sketch reminiscent of his work as an illustrator: the ink drawing “People in a Hurry” (1914), in which tiny headed figures take immense strides through a space of finely crosshatched lines. Gallery-goers should seek out his marvelous comic strip “Kin-der-Kids” (available in a cheap paperback from Dover) – a mixture of macabre fantasy, childlike naivete, and unblinking observation. His incisive lines and veering rhythms populated his cartoon worlds with bizarrely elongated (but quite believable) figures.

In 1907, at age 36, the artist decided to abandon illustration and take up painting, and his sketchbooks show the racy distortions of his cartoons turning into subtler, more naturalistic forms. The beautifully understated pencil drawing “Backyard, Paris” (1907) shows a wondrous assurance in its massing of lights and darks. Every element of the facades of buildings accentuates their diagonal drive upward, with rich tones conveying the movements of details in and out of shadow. Just above the dormers at the top, chimneys peer from a still higher vantage point, giving an effect of a stretching, almost dizzying height.

A series of slightly later sketches shows a new directness, fluidly combining keen perceptions and inventive attack. These drawings present the greatest discovery of this exhibition: We get to meet another Feininger, an artist drawing upon his considerable cartooning gifts, without being tied to either the idiom of cartoons or the methodology of his faceted style.

The brisk, looping crayon strokes in “Country Road, Baltic” (1910), apparently completed in just a few intense minutes, deftly sum up a road zigzagging into the distance between rows of trees, their canopies spreading overhead. “View of a Lake, Baltic” (1910) seems to have taken just a few moments longer; its nuanced, crosshatched tones vividly establish the dark verticals of house and tree, between which glimmers a lake, a patch of pure paper-white in the mid-distance. A few strokes powerfully cap ture soot-black boats and their reflections on the water’s glassy surface.

In 1937, the Nazis included Feininger’s works in their exhibitions of “degenerate” art. The artist moved that same year back to the United States, where he was to spend his final two decades. Several watercolors of crystalline landscapes and seascapes date from this late period. “Gentle Swell” (1947) uses ruled lines, delicately tipping, to establish the luminous receding surface of a still sea. A lone sail abruptly breaks the horizon, while a fluid cloud above moves slowly from shadow to light.

In its mysterious stillness you sense the artist’s firm control – not the zany precision of his comics, nor the spontaneous largesse of his “natur-notizen” – but a private, self-contained vision. It’s a space he had earned, perhaps, after many trials and new beginnings.

Proceeds from the sale of these works will benefit the Lyonel Feininger Catalogue Raisonne Project. Its initial volume, to be published next year on the 50th anniversary of his death, will include more than 200 of his early paintings, many reproduced in color for the first time.

Until September 16 (167 E. 73rd Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues, 212-988-4500). The gallery declined to disclose its prices.