Lyonel Feininger

Lyonel Feininger , 1871-1956, American painter and illustrator, b. New York City. Feininger studied painting in Berlin, Hamburg, and Paris. He was an illustrator and caricaturist for several periodicals in Paris and in Germany and had a weekly comic page (1906-7) in the Chicago Tribune before he turned to easel painting in 1907. He exhibited with the Blaue Reiter group and taught at the Bauhaus in Germany (1919-32). His canvases appeared in the so-called degenerate art exhibition of 1933. He returned permanently to the United States in 1937, taught at Mills College, and exhibited extensively. Feininger was fascinated by sailboats and skyscrapers, themes that appear in many of his oils and watercolors. He developed a delicate geometric style with interlocking translucent planes, suggestive of both light rays and architectural forms. Feininger is represented in New York City in the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum, and his works are also included in other leading collections.

Bibliography: See his reminiscences, ed. by J. L. Ness (1974); definitive catalog of his graphic work by L. E. Prasse (1972); biographies by H. Hess (1961) and E. Schuyer (1964); study by T. L. Feininger (1965); The Comic Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger (1994), ed. by B. Blackbeard.

Feininger, Lyonel (b New York, 17 July 1871; d New York, 13 Jan. 1956). American painter who spent most of his career in Europe. He was born into a German-American musical family; in 1887 he moved to Germany with the intention of studying music, but he turned instead to art. He had drawings published in Berlin's humorous weeklies and by the turn of the century he was Germany's leading political cartoonist. In 1906–8 he lived in Paris and under the influence of Robert Delaunay turned seriously to painting. By 1912 he had evolved a personal style (influenced by Cubism but highly distinctive) in which natural forms were treated in terms of a rhythmic pattern of prismatically coloured interpenetrating planes bounded by straight lines—a manner that he applied particularly to architectural and marine subjects. Although—as an American citizen—he was an alien, he remained in Germany throughout the First World War and afterwards taught at the Bauhaus from its foundation in 1919 (one of his woodcuts appeared on the cover of its manifesto) until its closure by the Nazis in 1933; he was the only person to be on the staff from start to finish, although he did little teaching in its later years. In 1935 he visited the USA and in 1937 (the year in which the Nazis declared his work degenerate) he returned there permanently. He settled in New York and adopted the architecture of Manhattan as one of his favourite subjects, working with vigour into his eighties. His son Andreas Feininger (1906–99) was a distinguished photographer and writer on photography. See also Blaue Vier.

Feininger, Lyonel (1871–1956) US painter. He left the USA for Europe in 1887 and became involved with cubism in 1912. He evolved a distinctive style of figurative scenes in straight-edged patterns of interconnecting planes, coloured to resemble prisms. He exhibited with the Blaue Reiter (1913) and taught at the Bauhaus (1919–33). In 1937 he returned to the USA and produced some of his best work, such as Dawn (1938).