The carnivalesque expressionism of Lyonel Feininger

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Lyonel Feininger: At the End of the World

By Barbara Haskell with essays by John Carlin, Bryan Gilliam, Ulrich Luckhardt and Sasha Nicholas

Although Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956), the painter and caricaturist, was born in New York he lived most of his productive years in Germany before finally returning to New York City in 1937.  He always suffered the emotional pain of being an expatriate, when in Germany he admired American directness and when in the USA he longed for a German respect for tradition and learning.  

Feininger remembered his most uncomplicated childhood years as his happiest, in the Connecticut countryside or watching trains and fully rigged ships on the Hudson River. Drawing constantly, these were subjects that became part of a visual repertoire which stayed with him always.  As well as drawing, the nine-year-old Feininger played the violin and by the age of 12 he was performing in public. When he was 16 his musical parents sent him to Leipzig to study music but instead Feininger chose to go to art school—the very prestigious Royal Academy in Berlin.  

While there he developed a strong interest in caricature and soon found work as an illustrator for some comic newspapers in Berlin. For the next few years he concentrated on drawing and in strengthening his skills to seize the character of a figure in seconds. His work was quite successful, being published in both Germany and in the USA and he invented a biting, satirical expression using exaggerated perspectives and inhabited by strange, half-human machines.  For a short period he illustrated a full-page comic supplement for the  Chicago Tribune  where he introduced readers to ‘your uncle Feininger’, and concentrated on an assortment of gadgets and flying machines and characters who had narrow escapes. The page was treated as an overall design with flat colour planes, silhouettes and abstract patterns rather like Japanese prints.

Feininger’s success as an illustrator was not a complete satisfaction for him because he had always wanted to be a fine artist. ‘I crave after serious work’ he said, and was determined to teach himself to paint.  A spell in Paris brought him into contact with some disciples of Matisse and his work, still with tilted perspectives and scale distortions, made daring advances in colour. The paintings that he exhibited in 1910 were closer to those of the German Expressionists, with their still sour tonalities and emotional intensity, than they were to the high-keyed palette of contemporary French painting, but the very next year, 1911, Feininger’s work was exhibited in a major Salon.  This was a period of explosive innovation in Berlin, with the German groups known as Der Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) and Die Brucke exhibiting in local galleries.  Although Feininger was invited to join them, strangely, he declined, fearing that his art was not yet fully formed. He was then overlooked in  the selection of works for New York’s Armory Show of 1913, which turned out to be an excellent and ground-breaking exposure of contemporary European art in the USA.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

Feininger first encountered Cubism in Paris. ‘I saw the light’ he said, ‘…Cubism showed the way.  Afterward it was amazing to find that for years I had been on the right road’. Initially, he was suspicious of what he called ‘the chaotic dispersal of form’ but within a year he had developed a style including geometric faceting and gradation of colour to express volume.  At no stage did he try to imitate or undertake the more intellectual manner of the ‘real’ Cubists, Picasso and Braque, who were showing a new way for understanding objects.  For him it was enough to break surfaces into crystalline slices in order to make angular, prismatic forms.  He called it ‘prism-ism’. Ships at sea wallowing in angular seas and faceted cathedral spires became familiar subjects and  The Green Bridge II (Grune Brucke II)  of 1916, used on the cover of the catalogue to his current retrospective in New York, is a fine example of this phase of his work.

In 1919 Feininger had what he called ‘the beginning of the finest adventure in his artistic career’ when he joined Gropius as a master of the Bauhaus, the school that aimed to reform art education and to unify fine art and craft.  He provided graphics and taught painting and drawing by instructing the students in practical skills. His colleagues at the Bauhaus were famous in many fields. Among them were Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and the composer Arnold Schoenberg.  It was at this time that Feininger was also able to indulge in music and he declared that ‘Music is the language of my innermost self’.

 His own oil paintings in the years before the Second World War are crystalline and fine, with very carefully modulated layers of transparent washes of pigment. It is said that he worked and reworked his canvases, sometimes wiping out entire compositions and starting fresh three times in a single day. The subject matter does not vary a great deal, consisting mostly of town streets and buildings constructed of emphatic verticals, or sailing yachts slanting in the wind, or horizontal seas and breakwaters. The painter used flat brushes to avoid any trace of gesture or handling and the general appearance is like looking through layers of light and atmosphere. He hoped to communicate what he called ‘sacred spaces’ and ‘an inner meaning rather than an outward form’ to stimulate the viewer’s understanding ‘of the mysteries of the divinity’ but too often they seem mannered, cold and too controlled to invigorate the spirit. These are the Feininger paintings we know best because many of them have found their way into museum collections in the USA.

In 1931 Feininger became inexorably caught up in Germany’s rising political crisis and the Bauhaus, now at Dessau, was closed by the city council. ‘Everything is shaky, in boundless fear of the times upon us and poisoned by politics’, wrote Feininger as the situation in Germany was spiralling out of control. A small number of galleries still dared to show avant-garde art, but public institutions and private collectors ceased buying it and after years of financial hardship Feininger was forced to leave Germany for the last time.

On his return to the USA the artist once again felt the pangs of dislocation. He wrote, ‘coming back after so many years of absence has been a strange experience.  I went away as a musician; I came back as a painter.  People I had known before were most of them dead.  Of the conditions and surroundings I had been familiar with nothing was left.  I had to readjust myself in every respect and sometimes felt my very identity had shrivelled within me’.  His work shifted from oil painting with rich layering of colour to thin transparent washes in watercolour over a network of drawn lines, first in charcoal, then ink.  The works had a dematerialized, weightless appearance and the subject matter returned to the sailing ships, buildings and arched viaducts of his earlier years.  Despite a large retrospective exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1944 organized by Alfred J. Barr, Feininger’s art never really acquired a position of sustained importance. He was disappointed by his own apparent lack of success after the major exhibition and lamented to a fellow artist, ‘How appallingly little carrying force exhibitions have in this country...whereas in Europe they grow outward and are taken into account and form a foundation which may be built on’.

The current very sumptuous retrospective of the work of Lyonel Feininger, subtitled ‘At the Edge of the World’ was organised by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.  The show can be seen in New York until mid-October and in Montreal from mid-January until the middle of May 2012. It includes works from all phases of the artist’s hugely diverse career, proving his enterprising spirit and showing the extent of his involvement with groups and institutions that defined the development of modern art.  These include Cubism, the Blaue Reite (Blue Rider), the Bauhaus, the Blue Four and Black Mountain College.

 We sense the comprehensive reach of the exhibition and its catalogue when we read of Feininger’s satirical illustrations and comics, his ‘carnivalesque Expressionist compositions and crystalline architectural scenes, his whimsical handcarved wooden figures and his late oils’.  But that’s not all, for we find additional essays focusing on his photographs and the musical fugues that he wrote in the 1920s.  We become aware of Feininger’s many interests when we read about his violin and organ studies running alongside his career as a visual artist.  A reed organ, squeezed between easels and brushes in his studio, provided release from those times that are euphemistically called the ‘creative impasse’.   The four essays, written by academics and museum curators, are packed with information about the variety and richness of Feininger’s oeuvre.  The most important and detailed one, carrying the overly dramatic title ‘Redeeming the sacred; the romantic modernism of Lyonel Feininger’ is by Barbara Haskell of the Whitney, who organised the exhibition and headed the team that produced the catalogue.  For this essay in particular, the author has made extensive and careful use of the Lyonel Feininger papers kept in the Houghton Library at Harvard University as well as other published works on the artist.

Lyonel Feininger – At the Edge of the World by Barbara Haskell with essays by John Carlin, Bryan Gilliam, Ulrich Luckhardt and Sasha Nicholas is published by Yale University Press, 2010. 256 colour and 12 mono illus. ISBN  978 0 300 16846 4