Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger (; July 17, 1871January 13, 1956) was a
German-American
German Americans (, ) are Americans who have full or partial German ancestry.
According to the United States Census Bureau's figures from 2022, German Americans make up roughly 41 million people in the US, which is approximately 12% of the pop ...
painter
Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...
, and a leading exponent of
Expressionism
Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...
. He also worked as a
caricaturist
A caricaturist is an artist who specializes in drawing caricatures.
List of caricaturists
* Abed Abdi (born 1942)
* Abril Lamarque (1904–1999)
* Al Hirschfeld (1903–2003)
* Alex Gard (1900–1948)
* Alexander Saroukhan (1898–1977)
* Alfre ...
and
comic strip
A comic strip is a Comics, sequence of cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often Serial (literature), serialized, with text in Speech balloon, balloons and Glossary of comics terminology#Captio ...
artist. He was born and grew up in New York City. In 1887 he traveled to Europe and studied art in Hamburg, Berlin and Paris. He started his career as a cartoonist in 1894 and met with much success in this area. He also worked as a commercial caricaturist for 20 years. At the age of 36, he began to work as a fine artist. His work, characterized above all by prismatically broken, overlapping forms in translucent colors, with many references to architecture and the sea, made him one of the most important artists of classical modernism. Furthermore he produced a large body of photographic works and created several piano compositions and fugues for organ.
Life and work
Lyonel Feininger was born to German-American violinist and composer
Karl Feininger and American singer Elizabeth Feininger.
He was born and grew up in New York City. In 1887 he traveled to Germany at the age of 16
[Cooper, Philip. ''Cubism''. London: Phaidon, 1995, p. 90. ] to study music, but switched to study drawing at the
Hamburger Gewerbeschule. In 1888, he moved to Berlin and studied at the
Königliche Akademie der Künste, Berlin under
Ernst Hancke. He continued his studies at art schools in Berlin with
Adolf Schlabitz, and in Paris with sculptor
Filippo Colarossi. He began working as a caricaturist. He worked for several magazines, including ''
Harper's Round Table'', ''
Harper's Young People
''Harper's Young People'' was an American children's magazine between 1879 and 1899. The first issue appeared in the fall of 1879. It was published by Harper & Brothers. It was Harper's fourth magazine to be established, after ''Harper's Magazi ...
'', ''Humoristische Blätter'', ''
Lustige Blätter'', ''
Das Narrenschiff'', ''
Berliner Tageblatt'' and ''
Ulk''.
In 1900, he met
Clara Fürst, daughter of the painter Gustav Fürst. He married her in 1901, and they had two daughters. In 1905, he separated from his wife after meeting Julia Berg. He married Berg in 1908 and the couple had three sons.
The artist was represented with drawings at the exhibitions of the annual
Berlin Secession in the years 1901 through 1903.
Feininger's career as cartoonist began in 1894. He was working for several German, French and American magazines. In February 1906, when a quarter of Chicago's population was of German descent,
James Keeley, editor of The ''
Chicago Tribune
The ''Chicago Tribune'' is an American daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Founded in 1847, it was formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper", a slogan from which its once integrated WGN (AM), WGN radio and ...
'' traveled to Germany to procure the services of the most popular humor artists. He recruited Feininger to illustrate two comic strips "
The Kin-der-Kids" and "
Wee Willie Winkie's World" for the ''Chicago Tribune''.
The strips were noted for their fey humor and graphic experimentation. He also worked as a commercial caricaturist for 20 years for various newspapers and magazines in the United States, Germany, and France. Later, Art Spiegelman
Itzhak Avraham ben Zeev Spiegelman ( ; born February 15, 1948), professionally known as Art Spiegelman, is an American cartoonist, editor, and comics advocate best known for his graphic novel ''Maus''. His work as co-editor on the comics magazin ...
wrote in ''The New York Times Book Review
''The New York Times Book Review'' (''NYTBR'') is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of ''The New York Times'' in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely rea ...
,'' that Feininger's comics have "achieved a breathtaking formal grace unsurpassed in the history of the medium."[
Feininger started working as a fine artist at the age of 36. He was a member of the '' Berliner Sezession'' in 1909, and he was associated with German expressionist groups: ]Die Brücke
Die Brücke (The Bridge), also known as Künstlergruppe Brücke or KG Brücke, was a group of German expressionist artists formed in Dresden in 1905. The founding members were Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Karl Schmidt-R ...
, the Novembergruppe, Gruppe 1919, the Blaue Reiter circle and Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). His first solo exhibit was at Sturm Gallery in Berlin, 1917. When Walter Gropius
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (; 18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) was a German-born American architect and founder of the Bauhaus, Bauhaus School, who is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He was a founder of ...
founded the Bauhaus
The Staatliches Bauhaus (), commonly known as the , was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined Decorative arts, crafts and the fine arts.Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th edn., ...
in Germany in 1919, Feininger was his first faculty appointment, and became the master artist in charge of the printmaking workshop.[Muir, Laura and Nathan Timpano. Lyonel Feininger: Photographs 1928–1939.]
From 1909 until 1918, Feininger spent summer vacations on the island of Usedom to recover and to get new inspiration. Typical of works from this period were marine settings from the shores of the Baltic See (Ostsee). He continued to create paintings and drawings of Benz for the rest of his life, even after returning to live in the United States. A tour of the sites appearing in the works of Feininger follows a path with markers in the ground to guide visitors.
He designed the cover for the Bauhaus 1919 manifesto: an expressionist woodcut
Woodcut is a relief printing technique in printmaking. An artist carves an image into the surface of a block of wood—typically with gouges—leaving the printing parts level with the surface while removing the non-printing parts. Areas that ...
'cathedral'. He taught at the Bauhaus for several years. Among the students who attended his workshops were Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack (German/Australian (1893–1965), Hans Friedrich Grohs (German 1892 – 1981), and Margarete Koehler-Bittkow (German/American, 1898–1964).
When the Nazi Party
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party ( or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor ...
came to power in 1933, the situation became unbearable for Feininger and his wife. The Nazi Party declared his work to be "degenerate".[ They moved to America after his work was exhibited in the ' degenerate art' (''Entartete Kunst'') in 1936, but before the 1937 exhibition in ]Munich
Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...
. He taught at Mills College
Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland, California is part of Northeastern University's global university system. Mills College was founded as the Young Ladies Seminary in 1852 in Benicia, California; it was relocated to Oakland in ...
before returning to New York. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters
The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, Music of the United States, music, and Visual art of the United States, art. Its fixed number ...
in 1955.
In addition to drawing, painting, woodcutting, and printmaking, Feininger created art with painted toy figures being photographed in front of drawn backgrounds.
Feininger produced a large body of photographic works between 1928 – he was then already 58 years old – and the mid-1950s. He then lived and taught in Dessau, where his neighbor was the famous experimental photographer László Moholy-Nagy
László Moholy-Nagy (; ; born László Weisz; July 20, 1895 – November 24, 1946) was a Kingdom of Hungary, Hungarian painter and photographer as well as a professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by Constructivism (art), con ...
, who encouraged him. He kept his photographic work within his circle of friends, and it was not shared with the public in his lifetime. He gave some prints away to his colleagues Walter Gropius
Walter Adolph Georg Gropius (; 18 May 1883 – 5 July 1969) was a German-born American architect and founder of the Bauhaus, Bauhaus School, who is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of modernist architecture. He was a founder of ...
and Alfred H. Barr Jr.
Feininger also had intermittent activity as a pianist and composer, with several piano compositions and fugues for organ extant. In tandem with the Whitney retrospective, the American Symphony Orchestra under Leon Botstein, at Carnegie Hall on 21 October 2011, performed three orchestral fugues written by Feininger. Barbara Haskell, curator of the Whitney exhibit, wrote that for his entire life, Feininger credited Bach with having been his "master in painting."
His sons, Andreas Feininger and T. Lux Feininger, both became noted artists, the former as a photographer and the latter as a photographer and painter. T. Lux Feininger died July 7, 2011, at the age of 101.
Major retrospectives
A major retrospective exhibition of Lyonel Feininger's work was put on in 2011–2012: it opened initially at the Whitney Museum of American Art
The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...
, June 30 through October 16, 2011, subsequently at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, January 1 through May 13, 2012. The exhibition is described as "the first in Feininger's native country in more than forty-five years, and the first ever to include the full breadth of his art" and as "accompanied by a richly illustrated monograph with a feature essay that provides a broad overview of Feininger's career..." Many critics have argued that the artist's work was at its most mature around 1910 in works in which the power of Feininger as illustrator balance his abstract side; however, we have to consider the possibility that Feininger used Cubism
Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement which began in Paris. It revolutionized painting and the visual arts, and sparked artistic innovations in music, ballet, literature, and architecture.
Cubist subjects are analyzed, broke ...
as a more artistically succinct tool to establish his version of the concept known as the objective correlative.
An important retrospective exhibition of Lyonel Feininger's photographic work took place Germany and the USA in 2011–2012, from Berlin
Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...
(Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen) to Cambridge, Massachusetts
Massachusetts ( ; ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Maine to its east, Connecticut and Rhode ...
( Busch-Reisinger Museum), through Munich
Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...
(Pinakothek der Moderne
The Pinakothek der Moderne (, '' Pinakothek of the Modern'') is a modern art museum, situated in central Munich's '' Kunstareal''.
The building
Designed by German architect Stephan Braunfels, the Pinakothek der Moderne was inaugurated in Se ...
) and Los Angeles ( J. Paul Getty Museum).
In popular culture
In Robert M. Pirsig's '' Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'' (1974) the narrator finds a print of Feininger's "Church of the Minorites" hanging in the office that used to be his in his earlier life as Phaedrus.
He writes that his friend "had frowned because it was a print and prints are of art and not art themselves ..But the print had an appeal to him that was irrelevant to the art in that the subject, a kind of Gothic cathedral, created from semiabstract lines and planes and colors and shades, seemed to reflect his mind's vision of the Church of Reason and that was why he'd put it here." Finding the print jolts loose "an avalanche of memory" of the very place his madness started.
Art market
At a 2001 Christie's
Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie (auctioneer), James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, and it has additional salerooms in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Milan, Geneva, Shan ...
auction in London, Feininger's painting ''The Green Bridge'' (1909) was sold for £2.42 million.
At a 2007 Sotheby's auction in New York, Feininger's oil painting "Jesuits III" (1915) sold for $23,280,000.
At a 2017 Sotheby's
Sotheby's ( ) is a British-founded multinational corporation with headquarters in New York City. It is one of the world's largest brokers of fine art, fine and decorative art, jewellery, and collectibles. It has 80 locations in 40 countries, an ...
auction in New York, Feininger's oil painting ''Fin de séance'' (1910) sold for $5,637,500.Sotheby's New York
16 May 2017
Selected works
* 1907, ''Der weiße Mann'', (Collection Museo Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid)
* 1910, ''Straße im Dämmern'', ( Sprengel Museum, Hannover)
* 1913, ''Gelmeroda I'', (Private collection, New York)
* 1913, ''Leuchtbake'', (Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany)
* 1916, ''Grüne Brücke II'' (Green Bridge II), ( North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh)
* 1918, ''Teltow II'', (Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin)
* 1918, "Yellow Streets II", (Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, Montréal)
* 1920, ''Ostsee-Segelboote II'', (Private collection, Wichita, KS)
* 1922, ''Church of Heiligenhafen'', ( Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, NC)
* 1925, ''Barfüßerkirche in Erfurt I'', ( Staatsgalerie Stuttgart)
* 1926, ''Barfüßerkirche II'' (''Church of the Minorites II'')
* 1929, ''Halle, Am Trödel'', (Bauhaus-Archive
The Bauhaus Archive () is a state archive and Museum of Design located in Berlin. It collects art pieces, items, documents and literature which relate to the Bauhaus School (1919–1933), and puts them on public display. Currently, the museum ...
, Berlin)
* 1931, ''Die Türme über der Stadt (Halle)'', (Museum Ludwig, Köln)
* 1936, ''Gelmeroda XIII'', (Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an Encyclopedic museum, encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the List of largest museums, third-largest museum in the world and the List of larg ...
, New York)
* 1940, ''The River'', (Worcester Art Museum
The Worcester Art Museum houses over 38,000 works of art dating from antiquity to the present day and representing cultures from all over the world. The museum opened in 1898 in Worcester, Massachusetts. Its holdings include Roman mosaics, Europe ...
, MA)
References
Further reading
*
*
* Haskell, Barbara. ''Lyonel Feininger: At The Edge of the World''. Exhibition Catalogue. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2011
*
*
* Muir, Laura and Nathan Timpano. ''Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, 1928–1939''. Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums and Hatje Cantz, 2011
* Nisbet, Peter. ''Lyonel Feininger: Drawings and Watercolors''. Cambridge: Harvard Art Museums and Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2011
External links
*
* Feininger retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Yor
Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World
Lyonel Feininger Project
Moeller Fine Art – Lyonel Feininger
Moeller Fine Art, New York + Berlin, world expert on Lyonel Feininger
The Ohio State University Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum: Lyonel Feininger digital exhibit
at Don Markstein's Toonopedia
Don Markstein's Toonopedia (subtitled A Vast Repository of Toonological Knowledge) is an online encyclopedia of print cartoons, comic strips and animation, initiated February 13, 2001. Donald D. Markstein, the sole writer and editor of Toonopedi ...
Archived
from the original on April 15, 2015.
Galerie Ludorff, Düsseldorf, Germany
Biography
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Feininger, Lyonel
German male painters
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20th-century American illustrators
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American caricaturists
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1871 births
1956 deaths
20th-century German painters
20th-century American male artists
20th-century American painters
Academic staff of the Bauhaus
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Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Mills College faculty
Modern painters
Black Mountain College faculty
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