Artist Biography & Facts

Lyonel Feininger

An abstract modernist, Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger was part of the German  avant-garde of the early twentieth century and one of the early teachers at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany in 1919, founded by architect Walter Gropius.  In 1921, he had a joint exhibition with Paul Klee at the Weimar Museum.

With Cubist style and evocative color, he depicted modern life, especially factories, bridges, ships, harbors, and buildings.

Feininger was born in New York City to German Jewish parents, son of violinist Karl Feininger and singer Elizabeth Cecilia (Lutz) Feininger.  He moved to Germany in 1887 intending to study music but taking drawing lessons in Hamburg instead.  He moved to Berlin in 1888, enrolling at the Royal Academy of Art.  At the request of his father, he moved to Belgium in 1890, attending the Collège Saint Servais in Lüttich, but returned to Berlin the following year, continuing his studies at the academy.   Besides painting, Feininger did become an accomplished pianist and composed fugues, which reflected his art that explored interrelationships, synchronization, overlapping in the building of an overall sense of order.

He remained in Germany until 1936, where he had begun working as an illustrator of children's books and as a political cartoonist for several periodicals in 1889.  From 1906 to 1908, he lived in Paris, and focused on his painting, studying at the Academie Colarossi.  Upon his return to Berlin, Feininger joined the "Berliner Secession" group.  In 1911 he exhibited eleven works at the "Salon des Indépendants" in Paris, and through his friendships with Jules Pascin and Robert Delaunay he became interested in Cubism and Orphism.  Upon his return to Germany, the architecture of German towns with their Gothic cathedrals became subject of his painting, and in 1913, he left the "Berliner Secession".  While Feininger had already befriended Kandinsky and Klee of the "Blaue Reiter" in 1912, he did not become a member of the group.

In 1919, he was invited to join the faculty of the Bauhaus in Weimar, where he served as the first artistic director of the printing shop. His woodcut titled The Cathedral of Socialism served as a cover design for the Bauhaus manifesto by Gropius.  Feininger remained at the school, which moved to Dessau in 1926.  Hitler closed the school in 1933, and in 1936 Feininger followed an invitation to teach at Mills College in Oakland, California.  Returning by the end of the year, he permanently moved his family to New York in 1937,  teaching again at Mills College during the summer.

Under the Nazi regime Feininger, whose work had been widely exhibited and collected, became one of the many modern German artists whose work was banned and removed from public view.  After he permanently left Germany in 1937, several of his paintings that had been confiscated were shown in the Nazi government exhibition of "Degenerate Art" held in Munich in 1937. 

In 1939 Feininger was invited to create murals for the New York World's Fair, and he found his new subject matter in the urban landscape of New York.  His work found much acclaim and is represented in museums in the U.S. and abroad. 

Lyonel Feininger died in New York January 15, 1956.

Two sons, Andreas and Theodore Lux, became artists.

Sources include:
Matthew Baigell, Dictionary of American Artists
Edan Hughes, Artists in California
Peter Falk (editor), Who Was Who in American Art
Phillips Collection

Lyonel Feininger was born in 1871.  He traveled to Hamburg, Germany in 1887, originally to study music but quickly turned to art, studying at the Berlin Academy.  Feininger was a Cubist painter who depicted modern life and architecture such as cathedrals, factories and harbors.  He infused his subjects with emotional color, which was meant to be evocative. Feininger worked as an illustrator, cartoonist and also created children's books.

In 1919, Feininger was invited to join the faculty of the Bauhaus, where he taught until Hitler shut it down in 1933.  A few of his paintings were confiscated by the Nazis and shown at the "Degenerate Art Show" in Munich, 1937.  Feininger was part of "The Blue Four", along with Kandinsky, Klee and Von Jawlensky.  His work added dimensions in space though the use of light.  Feininger successfully fused Cubism with Expressionism.  He died in 1956.

LYONEL CHARLES ADRIAN FEININGER (1871–1956)

Lyonel Feininger struggled with his identity and his loyalties: a native of New York City, he Lyonel Feininger struggled with his identity and his loyalties: a native of New York City, he spent nearly fifty years in Germany where he was known as “der Amerikaner,” but subsequently struggled to reassimilate to life in the United States. He was an accomplished musician whose paintings in oil and watercolor hovered between abstraction and representation, and he was both a celebrated fine artist and graphic artist. Feininger was also a skilled photographer and woodcarver.

Feininger’s parents were successful musicians: his German-born father was a violinist and his mother a pianist and singer. The couple’s international touring schedule meant that their only son—christened Charles Léonell—and his two sisters were frequently left to the care of others. In 1887, Leo (as he was known) sailed for Hamburg, Germany, to advance his violin studies. However, he quickly shifted course, enrolling instead at the local technical school, where he excelled in drawing courses. In 1888, he was accepted at the Royal Academy of the Arts of Berlin and developed an affinity for caricature. Seeking to broaden his general education, he attended a Jesuit college in Liège, Belgium from 1890 to 1892, before spending six months in the life drawing class at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. Upon his return to Berlin in 1893, Feininger supported himself with illustration work, specifically cartoons and caricatures; in 1906, he created The Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World for the Chicago Tribune which ran the series in color on full pages in the Sunday edition. The following year, Feininger began to paint in oil.

Feininger showed six paintings at the 1911 Salon des Artistes Indépendants in Paris, a controversial exhibition that introduced him to Cubism. Over the next few years, he lived in Weimar, interacted with several German Expressionists, and in 1913 exhibited with Der Blaue Reiter, an avant-garde art collective. His black and white woodcuts—a medium he took up in the face of a shortage of painting supplies—of this period are characterized by deeply cut grooves and sharp edges. During World War I, he escaped the German draft because of his American citizenship.

Based on their mutual goal of incorporating art into daily life, Walter Gropius appointed Feininger as a “master” at the recently established Bauhaus in 1919, charging him with oversight of the printmaking studio. Gropius attributed the positive impact on Feininger’s students to their teacher’s “human qualities. . . . The modesty of his demeanor before even moderately talented students and his loving empathy . . . gave them pluck and respect.” Feininger was prolific in a variety of techniques, including woodcuts, lithography, and etching, making over four hundred prints during his lifetime. Simultaneously, he wrote fugues for the organ. When the school relocated to Dessau in 1926, he took the position of artist-in-residence and served as a student advisor rather than classroom instructor. In 1929, the Museum of Modern Art included seven Feininger works in its landmark second exhibition, Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans; two years later, the National Galerie in Berlin mounted a retrospective of his work.

As Hitler rose to power, the Bauhaus closed in 1933; four years later, the Nazis confiscated over six hundred works, including many by Feininger which were deemed “degenerate.” After teaching during the summer of 1936 at Mills College in Oakland, California, Feininger went back to Germany, but returned to the United States the following year, with only two dollars in his pocket. He told Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, “coming back after so many years of absence has been a strange experience. I went away a musician, I came back as a painter.” Feininger established a home in New York, where he fulfilled mural commissions for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He also continued to execute semi-abstract city- and seascapes, canvases distinguished by “shafts of blurry light, falling on indistinct suggestions of church steeples, buildings, sailboats, and ocean waves.” In 1945, Feininger accepted an invitation from his former Bauhaus colleague Josef Albers to teach a summer course at Black Mountain College in North Carolina; his friend Walter Gropius led the architecture courses that same term. In the latter years of his career, Feininger was elected president of the Federation of American Painters and Sculptors and as a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

The Museum of Modern Art presented a dual retrospective of Feininger and Marsden Hartley’s work in 1944; in 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted a major retrospective, which included the full scope of Feininger’s work. The greatest influence on Feininger’s art was Cubism; as a result, much of his work is characterized by intersecting planes, often translucent, with many references to architecture and the sea. Cubism, Feininger believed, melded his musical interests with painting: “Cubism is a synthesis, but may easily be degraded into mechanism. . . . My ‘Cubism’ . . . is visionary, not physical.” In figurative work, there is often the quality of a caricature, due to his penchant for long-legged proportions. In every pursuit, Feininger maintained, “my artistic faith is founded on a deep love of nature, and all I represent or have achieved is based on this love.”

The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg, South Carolina
thejohnsoncollection.org