
Lyonel Feininger
German-American Painter, Printmaker, Cartoonist, Photographer
Movements and Styles: Bauhaus, Cubism, Der Blaue Reiter, Modern Photography
Born: July 17, 1871 - New York City, NY
Died: January 13, 1956 - New York City, NY

"Each individual work serves as an expression of our most personal state of mind at that particular moment and of the inescapable, imperative need for release by means of an appropriate act of creation: in the rhythm, form, color, and mood of a picture."

Synopsis
A leader of the Cubo-Expressionist movement and a founding member of the experimental Bauhaus school, Lyonel Feininger embraced abstraction as a way of conveying new vision and utopian aspirations. Although his first success was as the cartoonist of popular newspaper comics, such as "Kin-der-Kids" and "Wee Willie Winkie's World" for the Chicago Sunday Tribune, when he decided to pursue a career in fine art he was enthusiastically embraced by several German Expressionist groups, including Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter. Later, he was the first faculty member to be recruited by Walter Gropius for the new Bauhaus school where he led the printmaking workshop. When his work was included in the 1937 Degenerate Art Show, marking him as a target for artistic censorship and surveillance, Feininger returned to America with his family where he continued to produce art and teach.
Key Ideas
Most Important Art
![]() | Green Bridge (1909)With this painting, Feininger made a notable debut at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants in Paris, revealing a combination of his cartooning experience and avant-garde credentials. While this work depicts the "types" of people he had often caricatured, they are placed into a distorted architectural space that suggests Cubist faceting and Fauvist color. He combines these expressive elements to create an atmosphere of mysterious space and urban isolation. The large green bridge looms over a street lined with buildings painted in contrasting red, creating a sense of unease and tension. The figures on the street below, a somber group that includes workers, prostitutes, children, and a sailor, appear unaware that they are being watched from the bridge by a group of top-hatted men. Read More ... The work's non-descriptive use of color led the Salon's hanging committee to include Feininger's work in a room of Fauve paintings. According to one, admittedly apocryphal, story told by Robert Delaunay, when Matisse arrived to hang his work in the same room, he examined Feininger's entry for some time before leaving to "work over his painting before he would let it stand comparison." Whether this truly happened, Feininger's painting was admired in a number of contemporary reviews and he painted a second version in 1916, now in the collection of the North Carolina Museum of Art. |
Lyonel Feininger: Of Interest





Content compiled and written by Sarah Archino
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
" Artist Overview and Analysis". [Internet]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Sarah Archino
Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors
Available from:
[Accessed ]
Lyonel Feininger Artist Overview Page:
This is a mini-page that we designed for artists that are harder (or maybe impossible) to find detailed information on. If you would like us to put in a significant effort to build more information into this page, please comment. Thank you