Artists Lyonel Feininger

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

Table of contents

> Synopsis
> Key Ideas
> Most Important Art

Quotes

"There is no foreground or background, only a continuity of interlacing relationships."

Lyonel Feininger

"The most beautiful landscape cannot hold my fascinated attention as much as nature by the seaside and all that is connected with water."

Lyonel Feininger

"Where I used to strive for movement and restlessness I now attempt to sense and express the complete total calm of objects and the surrounding air."

Lyonel Feininger

"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

Feininger was one of only two American artists to actively participate in the development of Expressionism within the German avant-garde (the other was Marsden Hartley). His connections to artistic centers throughout Europe and America made him an important conduit for transatlantic exchanges of ideas. His paintings combined the faceting and multiple perspectives of Cubism with Expressionistic color and brushwork to create an influential hybrid of Cubo-Expressionism.

The first instructor hired at the Bauhaus, Feininger remained a constant presence at the school until it was shuttered by the Nazis in 1933. His emphasis on building a community of artists and his belief in the revolutionary possibilities of art making provided an important model for other instructors and their students (including his own children). When he left Germany in 1937, he brought to America the innovative pedagogy of the Bauhaus, and (along with other Bauhaus instructors who relocated to the US) he helped revolutionize the teaching of art in the country to include more experimentation and less reliance on the study of traditional or canonical art.

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.

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.