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Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956)

The son of German parents, Lyonel Feininger was born in New York in 1871. He moved to Germany in 1887, studied in Hamburg, Berlin, and Paris, and worked as a caricaturist and draftsman in Berlin for fourteen years before beginning to paint in the Cubist style. In 1919 he was appointed "master" at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Later he immigrated to the United States when the National Socialists declared his work "degenerate."

Lyonel Feininger's art holds an intrinsic beauty and importance recognized internationally. Famous for his Cubist paintings, Feininger was an essential member of the Bauhaus school. Most recognizable for his Cubist architectural scenes, Feininger's range of art stretches to woodcuts, cartoons, drawings, pen and ink, and watercolor, depicting subjects ranging from people to still-life to sketches of landscape vistas. Feininger strove to "transform in the mind and crystallize what one sees." Reality in his work does not rely strictly upon the representation of observed impressions but in the appropriation and transformation of perceptions into spatial and plastic, multidimensional pictorial structures. Feininger's work is built up of layers of prismatic and crystalline forms, one above the other. Only their mutual interpretation produces the object, and it leads into the depth of the pictorial space rather than to its surface. Aside from the use of pictorial space for purely architectural depiction, the fundamental innovation in his work is the creation of formal volume through the overlapping of color planes.

Spatial depth and volume, intrinsic to Feininger's work, changed with his development as an artist. In his first paintings, compositions deal with earthbound energies trying to disengage themselves. Conflict between the aspiring verticals and the gravitating horizontals result in diagonal forms, exuding a dynamic ascent. As the war ended, the tension which had held him since 1910 began to relax. His great seriousness gave way to a more serene and lyrical mood, softer and finer. In the pictures he created in the second half of the 1920s, Feininger achieved ever greater calm and clarity of form.

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