Lyonel Feininger
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LYONEL FEININGER lived in Europe for more than half a long life--fifty out of eighty years. Before the first World War he had already developed a geometric style for which cubism was at least an encouragement. But the source was quite personal. Feininger was trained to be a musician, and the formal music of Bach was the great influence upon him. Lines are organized like notes, and music allowed him to abstract from the accidental world of appearances.
He was born in New York in 1871. The first sixteen years of his life were spent in the New York region, and they have a particular importance, as his art is steeped in nostalgia and fed from early recollections. His parents were musicians, his father a violinist and composer, his mother a concert singer. They performed together and were often on tour. Solitude fed the boy's imagination, and New York developed his sense of wonder. There is a streak of fantasy, of Hans Christian Andersen in Feininger (he was a toymaker all his life) which offsets the severity of his dedication.
He followed his parents to Europe, joined them in Berlin, stayed on with his mother when they separated. After a period of indecision he gave up music for art school and emerged a caricaturist on Lustige Blätter and Ulk. He was in Paris working on Le Temoin by 1906. He ground through a year's contract to produce "funny papers" for the Chicago Tribune and brought this phase of his life to a conclusion.
Determined to paint, he chose Zehlendorf in the suburbs of Berlin for his strenuous and private struggle toward a style of his own. Caricature--still showing in Locomotive with Big Wheel--had at least freed him from the literal. He was soon filling a congested space with brittle fragments of houses, bridges, and ships, and his canvases eventually became as abstract as Bridges V. Married, and with a family, he stayed on in Germany through the first World War.
He was the first artist chosen by the architect Walter Gr opius for the staff of the school that became the Bauhaus. The 'twenties in Weimar and Dessau were great and expansive years for Feininger, working with Gropius, Kandinsky and Klee. His oils now took on depth, deep space filled with serenity and light, and the exalted romantic nature of his art came to the fore. Like Turner, he set the sun in the sky. Architecture on land or sea was his subject, but his lines-according to Gropius--are not architecture, they are rays of light. So they must be straight, and must continue until they are reflected, or splinter off an opposing surface. Larger forms are luminous areas that shift like northern lights, while a few figures stand transfixed in the foreground, contemplating (in a mood of Goethe) a scene which is more a habitation for genius than the environment of men.
After the meager and then the evil times which followed, he left Germany like other men of good will. He taught at Mills College in 1936, and the following year he was home for good He was -unrecognized as an American, but his reputation, at first rescued by the discerning, gradually broadened its new base.
He lived in New York within walking distance of his birthplace, and the tall city served him well as subject matter. In his late years he turned more to water color, and an evening mist of atmosphere tended to blur his forms. But on occasion his talent blazed forth and he produced a number of conclusive works which have all his old-time authority and vigor.
He died in his native city, early in 1956.
Feininger: In one respect, perhaps, my work may be considered of significance: Its passionate quest for strictest delineation of space, without an), compromising. In the glaring sun these days, seconded by shadows cast on brilliantly lit surfaces I see motifs of colossal consequence. A perfectly new plane-space conception.
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