t.lux feininger « Shrine of Dreams

Lyonel Feininger was the subject of three major exhibitions this year, two of them continuing in 2012. Yet, of the three, only the Whitney show makes any effort to cover all of Feininger’s varied career which involved comics, caricature, painting, photography, composing, and toy making.

Lyonel Feininger, c. 1910

Feininger was born in New York City in 1871. At the age of sixteen his parents sent him back to their native Germany to study music. Although Feininger was a deft musician, mastering several instruments, and composed a number of pieces, he preferred work as an illustrator for some of the many magazines and newspapers then being published in Germany. He made a name for himself as a satirical caricaturist and was very much in demand.

In 1906, the newspaper comics had become a great battleground between such publishing magnates as Hearst and Pulitzer. Chicago’s third-place paper, the Tribune, sent a talent scout to Europe to round up fresh material. Naturally, he went to Germany, the birthplace of comics pioneer Rudolph Dirks, whose very successful version of Wilhelm Busch’s Hans and Moritz, The Katzenjammer Kids, was a circulation-builder for Hearst’s New York Journal. Also important, at the time about a quarter of Chicago’s population were of German origin. Feininger’s fame as a caricaturist won him a contract for two strips: Wee Willie Winkie’s World and The Kin-Der-Kids. Feininger did not return to the US, but shipped his art across the Atlantic. Feininger was paid $6000 but stopped doing his strips after about ten months.

Aside from the Whitney, most studies of Feininger’s comics exclude his painting, and critics of his painting get sniffy about the comics. Feininger himself said. “Far be it from me to underrate those years as a comic draftsman. They were my only discipline.”

Perhaps it was the introduction to four-color newspaper printing, “Iridescent Polychromous Effulgence That Makes The Rainbow Look Like Lead Pipe”, as Hearst put it, that awakened Feininger’s color sense. At any rate, 1906 is when he began painting. He was 36. These early paintings demonstrate “explosive power” according to one review of the Whitney retrospective. Brillant colors, elongated or squashed figures, abstracted natural forms — these paintings are fun.

Feininger was associated with various Expressionist groups, experimenting with Cubism from 1911 or so. In 1919, he and other artists founded the Bauhaus movement. From this point on, Feininger’s painting seldom strayed from Cubism. His approach was very formal: a subject is viewed as though through a faceted crystal and usually rendered in rather dark-toned earth colors. Exciting for a while, the effect becomes boring over decades of work. But for a long time Feininger insisted on ordering his work along rigid lines. He didn’t so much adopt Cubism “as he was swallowed by it”.

"Cathedral of Socialism" frontispiece for the Bauhaus Manifesto, 1919

Feininger took up photography as well and an exhibition of his photographs that opened in Berlin has just travelled to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and will remain in the US, in LA or Boston, until June of 2012. Two of Feininger’s sons became photographers and their work is better known than that of their father.

"Drunk with Beauty, 1932

In 1913, Feininger began carving small toys — trains, boats, and figures — for his sons. This became a Christmas ritual that seized Feininger with excitement as the holiday neared: “… the time for my periodical craze for making toys for Christmas is approaching. Every year I get the urge to saw wood into bits and paint them in bright colours. The boys take it for granted that I shall make ‘mannequins’ for them.” The children loved these little carvings that were often presented as a scene or diorama. Twenty years after their father’s death, the grown sons put together a book of photographs of toys that they arranged called Lyonel Feininger: City at the end of the World. It is long out of print but parts of it may be seen here.

Feininger toys arranged and photographed by sons andreas and T. Lux Feininger. from Lyonel Feininger: City At the Edge of the World (1975)

Feininger’s work was labelled “degenerate” by the Nazis and the Bauhaus was closed in 1932. His wife was of Jewish ancestry and Feininger could see what was coming. After 1933 he quit making toys. His paintings become looser, possibly as he considers the strictures of his life, but are still somewhat somber. In 1937, Feininger accepted a teaching post in the United States.

Feininger became interested in color again and experimented with new methods of applying Cubist dicta. He was fascinated by skyscrapers and, for a time, they replaced other landscape subjects.

"Blue Skyscrapers", 1937

By the beginning of the war, Feininger’s work began to show his apprehension. “Spook” revives the figures of comics and toys as something more ambiguous.