Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, September 19, 2022: Lyonel Charles Feininger, a German-American painter (1651)

Monday, September 19, 2022

Artist of the Day, September 19, 2022: Lyonel Charles Feininger, a German-American painter (1651)

Lyonel Charles Feininger (1871 – 1956) was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist. He was born and grew up in New York City, traveling to Germany at 16 to study and perfect his art. He started his career as a cartoonist in 1894 and met with much success in this area. He was also a commercial caricaturist for 20 years for magazines and newspapers in the USA and Germany. At the age of 36, he started to work as a fine artist. He also produced a large body of photographic works between 1928 and the mid 1950s, but he kept these primarily within his circle of friends. He was also a pianist and composer, with several piano compositions and fugues for organ extant.

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, but traveled to Germany at the age of 16 in 1887 to study. In 1888, he moved to Berlin and studied at the Königliche Akademie Berlin under Ernst Hancke. He continued his studies at art schools in Berlin with Karl Schlabitz, and in Paris with sculptor Filippo Colarossi. He started as a caricaturist for several magazines including Harper's Round Table, Harper's Young People, 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 boys.

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, the Novembergruppe, Gruppe 1919, the Blaue Reiter circle and Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). His first solo exhibit was in Berlin, 1917. When Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Germany in 1919, Feininger was his first faculty appointment, and became the master artist in charge of the printmaking workshop.

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 Sea (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 'cathedral'. He taught at the Bauhaus for several years. Among the students who attended his workshops were Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack, Hans Friedrich Grohs, and Margarete Koehler-Bittkow.

When the Nazi Party 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. He taught at Mills College before returning to New York. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955.

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.

After his death, he was interred at Mount Hope Cemetery in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

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