Lyonel Feininger
Lyonel Charles Adrian Feininger ( July 17, 1871 in New York; † January 13, 1956 ) was a German -American painter, graphic artist and cartoonist. From 1909 he was a member of the Berlin Secession. With his work at the Bauhaus since 1919, he is one of the most important artists of classical modernism.
Feininger came with 36 years of painting. Previously, he had long worked as a commercial caricaturist for various German, French and American newspapers and magazines. He underwent his work a tough self- critical examination and developed, starting from his cartoons, quickly a very distinctive style of painting. In his paintings, the objects are excessive abstraction and design. Achieved thereby strength and the expression of Feininger's style influenced many contemporary artists and established its importance and its success. Often Feininger took up again in his work motifs and pictorial compositions own cartoons and sketches.
Made famous example, are his paintings of churches and village centers of Weimar in Thuringia surrounding land, whither he went 1906-1937 and over again for work and study. The pictures are mostly named and numbered according to the respective villages. ( Gelmeroda, Niedergrunstedt, Poss village, Mellingen, Vollersroda, Tiefurt, Taubach, Gabersdorf, Oberweimar, Zottelstedt etc.).
Life and work
Leonell ( Lyonel ) Feininger was the son of the respected German musician Charles Feininger ( concert violinist ) and Elisabeth Feininger ( pianist and singer ). 1887, with 16 years, Feininger first came to Germany with his parents, who were on a concert tour. With their permission, he was allowed to stay there and visit the School of Applied Arts in Hamburg. On 1 October of the following year he was accepted into the Royal Academy in Berlin. He began early to draw for publishers and magazines. In 1892 he began studying at the Paris Académie Colarossi, which had been founded by the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi. After a seven-month stay in Paris, he returned in 1893 to Berlin, where he was working as a freelance illustrator and cartoonist for magazines Harper's Young People, Humorous leaves, Josh and the fun leaves.
1901 married Feininger Clara Prince, the sister of the painter Edmund Prince. After 1905, the artist Julia Berg, born Lilienfeld ( 1881-1970 ) met, he separated from his wife Clara and their two daughters. In February 1906, he visited Julia in Weimar, where she studied at the Grand Ducal School of Arts. Together they traveled in July to Paris, where her son Andreas (1906-1999) was born. In July 1906 Feininger met in Paris on Robert Delaunay and Henri Matisse. He concluded with the Chicago Sunday Tribune a contract for two comic series, The Kin -der- Kids and Wee Willie Winkie 's World, which are now counted among the classics of the genre, but both were set back early. 1908 married Lyonel and Julia and settled in Berlin. They had two more sons, Laurence (1909-1976) and Theodore Lux ( 1910-2011 ).
1911 were issued ( the "Salon of Independent Artists") at the Pont d' Alma in Paris "Salon des Artistes Independants " six paintings Feininger. It made first contact with Cubism. 1912 met the painter know the artists group Die Brücke and established his first architectural compositions.
Together with the artists of the Blaue Reiter he took in 1913 at the invitation of Franz Marc at the First German Autumn Salon in Berlin gallery "Der Sturm" part. 1914, Feininger forth an etching and prepared artistic models of railways for industrial toy manufacturing. He also had an exhibition at the Galerie Arnold in Dresden. After the outbreak of the First World War, he returned to Berlin. Feininger's first solo exhibition was opened on 2 September 1917 in the gallery "Der Sturm ". On display were 45 paintings and 66 other works. Another solo exhibition was in 1918, the Gallery of Contemporary Art Hans Goltz in Munich in October. In November of the same year Feininger joined the initiated by Max Pechstein and César Klein November Group and met Walter Gropius. In 1919 he was appointed by Gropius as head of the graphic arts workshop to the Bauhaus in Weimar. Mid-August, Feininger moved with his family to the Gutenberg Straße 16 in Weimar. Following the holistic approach of the Bauhaus, Feininger was dedicated in 1921 and the music and composed his first joint.
The summer months spent Feininger with his wife Julia and their sons Andrew, Laurence and Theodore Lux like the sea, first on the island of Usedom, which he explored from 1908 to 1921 of quarters in Heringsdorf, Neppermin and Benz with the bike and where he, among other things multiply the Benzer St. Peter's Church painted, and from 1924 to 1935 in Deep on the Pomeranian Baltic coast near Kolberg. With its sea stays he made many sketches ( " Nature Notes" ), on whose motives he repeatedly fell back in later works.
Feininger at the Bauhaus, Involuntary end of his ministry in Germany
Feininger was appointed in 1919 to the founding of the Bauhaus as the first Bauhaus master Walter Gropius in Weimar. First, he was until 1925 the head of the Druckwerkstätten. 1921 a portfolio of linocuts by Feininger as his first Bauhaus publication was issued. 1923 remained Feininger at Erfurt. In New York, 47 paintings, watercolors, drawings and graphic prints in the Anderson Gallery are: A Collection of Modern German Art exhibited. 1924 founded Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Alexej von Jawlensky the exhibition community The Blue Four. After the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1925 was closed as a result of inputs of the Thuringian craftsmen, the German - nationalist block in the Thuringian Parliament, it was founded in Dessau in 1926 new. On July 30, 1926 Feininger and his family moved to Dessau in one of the newly built houses masterpieces. There Feininger was at his own request from all teaching responsibilities release at the Bauhaus. Until 1932 he remained at the urging of Walter Gropius ' "Master ".
1930/31 he worked at the invitation of the city of Halle ( Saale) in a total of eleven expressionist cityscapes of Halle, in particular the views of the Market Church and the Red tower were known. 1933 attracted Lyonel and Julia Feininger to Berlin. Even with the help of the Quedlinburg art collector Hermann Klumpp, the couple was able to leave Nazi Germany on 11 June 1937 for the USA, where Feininger worked as a painter in New York.
In the era of National Socialism Feininger's works were officially called " degenerate art ". The Nazis confiscated 378 works by the artist from public collections. A few months after his departure, they showed eight paintings ( Cities ), a watercolor and thirteen woodcuts on the Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich.
Feininger in New York
In 1936, Feininger visited New York, taught in the summer months at Mills College in Oakland, preparing his move to the United States. Galt Feininger in Germany. Than American painter, he was the New York audience after his return as " German " as good as unknown " At the beginning I suffered greatly under which the feeling of alienation [ ... ] ". In the summer of 1937 he was teaching at Mills College and produced first watercolors ( " Manhattan at Night" ) to, in which he grappled with New York. In 1939 he completed designs begun in Germany in the Baltic Sea and from Deep in Pomerania. A year later, he launched a series of " Manhattan - images", which had the modern " skyscraper " architecture and urban canyons on the topic. But stayed for Feininger - although living in New York - always remembered the motives of his former home still important pictorial theme. In 1944 he met Fernand Léger and presented for the first time - along with Marsden Hartley - a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art from. In 1947 he was elected president of the " Federation of American Painters and Sculptors " and " appointed one year before his death, a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
Feininger died at the age of 84 years at his home (235 East 22nd Street) in New York. He was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Hastings-on- Hudson ( Westchester County, New York). His son Andreas Feininger became a noted photographer in New York. His son Laurence Feininger ( musicologist ) died in 1976 in free field, Italy.
Works (selection)
Exhibitions (selection)
Lyonel Feininger took part in documenta 1 (1955) ( and also posthumously the documenta III in 1964 ) in Kassel.
- 2009: Back in America, 1937-1956. Museum Moritzburg. (First-time show of his late work. )
- February 2011: Feininger from Harvard. Drawings, watercolors and photographs. Prints and Drawings, Berlin
- April / May 2011 Lyonel Feininger. Ships and Meerer. Altona Museum, Hamburg. ( Selection of works from 1911 to 1955. )