Lyonel Feininger

Lyonel Feininger was born in New York City on July 17, 1871, the son of a German-American musical couple. At the age of 16 he followed his parents to Europe, where he attended the drawing and painting class at the Hamburg Gewerbeschule from 1888 to 1892 and then studied at the Königliche Akademie in Berlin. In 1889 he began working as a caricaturist for various national and international magazines. In 1909 Lyonel Feininger joined the ” Berliner Sezession”, in whose exhibitions he participated for the first time one year later. On the occasion of his exhibition at the “Salon des Indépendants”, the artist traveled to Paris in 1911, where his first contact with French Cubism took place. In 1912 Feininger met the artists’ group “Brücke” and produced his first architectural compositions. In 1913, at the invitation of the artist and curator Franz Marc, he participates in an exhibition at Herwarth Walden’s gallery “Der Sturm” in Berlin, where he also has his first solo exhibition in 1917. In 1919 Feininger accepted Walter Gropius’ invitation to teach graphic art and painting at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Following the holistic aspirations of the Bauhaus, he also devoted himself to music in 1921 and composed his first fugue. At the Bauhaus, together with Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Alexej von Jawlensky, he founded the exhibition group ” Die Blauen Vier” (The Blue Four) in 1924. In 1926 Feininger moved with the Bauhaus to Dessau, but was released from his teaching duties. During the National Socialist era, Feininger’s works were considered ” Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art”), and 378 of his works were confiscated from public collections. The Feininger couple emigrated to New York on June 11, 1937. However, Feininger had to wait until 1944 for his artistic breakthrough in the USA, when he had a retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art together with Fernand Léger. After the war, Feininger held a summer course at Black Mountain College, where he met Gropius and Einstein. His courses and publications become trend-setting for the development of abstract expressionist painting in the USA. Feininger died in New York on January 13, 1956.