Lyonel Feininger (1871‐1956)
Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956)
Rue jaune II Yellow Street II
1918
Huile sur toile
104,8 x 95,9 cm
MBAM, achat, don de la fondation de la famille Maxwell Cummings, de
l'Association des bénévoles du Musée des beaux arts de Montréal
Lyonel Feininger, Carnival in Arcueil, 1911.
Oil on canvas, 41 3/10 × 37
8/10 in (104.8 × 95.9 cm).
Art Institute of Chicago;
Joseph
Winterbotham Collection 1990.119
Lyonel Feininger, In a Village Near Paris (Street in Paris, Pink Sky),
1909.
Oil on canvas, 39 ¾ x 32 in. (101 × 81.3 cm).
University of Iowa
Museum of Art, Iowa City
Uprising
1910. Oil on canvas, 41 1/8 x 37 5/8" (104.4 x 95.4 cm)
MOMA
Lyonel Feininger's painting presents insurrectionaries
pouring onto the streets of a small French village. The motley band of
characters includes a clown, a portly bohemian, elegant ladies, and
historically clad characters trailing a cabaret singer, who appears in
the lower right corner. A dandy jauntily sidesteps his way into the
picture, elbowing a brilliantly colored and grotesquely elongated man
who bears a pitchfork topped with a red flag. Faceless men in top hats
march along a blank gray wall, which further constricts the narrow space
and creates a diagonal that serves to focus the direction of the
procession. Feininger emphasizes the movement of the crowd, giving no
hint of their goal.
The incongruous juxtapositions, including
startling differences in scale and clashes of garish colors, recall
Feininger's earlier work as a caricaturist and comic-strip illustrator.
He based this painting on sketches he made while living in Paris from
1906 to 1908 and on a drawing from 1909 now in the Museum's collection.
About the artist
Source: Oxford University Press
Painter, printmaker and illustrator. Although he was
sent to Germany as a teenager to study music, a drawing class at the
Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg instead sparked an interest in art, which
led to further training at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and in
1892–3 at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. Returning to Berlin, he was a
prominent illustrator by the mid-1890s for Ulk, Lustige Blätter and other leading German satirical magazines. His work also appeared in the USA, first for Harper’s Round Table in 1894 and 1895 and in 1906–7 in the comic strips ‘The Kin-der-Kids’ and ‘Wee Willie Winkie’s World’ for the Chicago Sunday Tribune,
by which time he was again in Paris. There he was also in contact with
Wilhelm Uhde, Jules Pascin and other members of the circle that met at
the Café du Dôme and produced a series of drawings for Le Témoin.
While often alluding to serious contemporary issues, the style of his
illustrations and drawings was fanciful rather than grotesque.
Seeking more creative freedom after first-hand
exposure to the French avant-garde, Feininger gave up illustration for
painting when he returned to Germany in 1908. Most of his early oil
paintings, such as
Emeute (1910; New York, MOMA), are street
scenes with numerous figures, which combine his already sensitive use of
line and shape with the spatial exaggeration and bold colours favoured
by the Fauves and his fellow Berlin Secessionists (with whom he had
first exhibited in 1903–4). After his first experience of
Cubism
at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911 and subsequent contact with major
German Expressionist groups, including Die Brücke in 1912 and the Blaue
Reiter, with whom he exhibited in the
Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon
a year later, he concentrated on landscapes; although they remained
intensely luminous, they were more formally ordered by an underlying
network of precisely modulated, intersecting planes (e.g.
Bridge I,
1913; St Louis, MO, Washington U., Gal. A.). Despite difficulties as a
foreigner during World War I, he held his first one-man show at Herwarth
Walden’s Sturm-Galerie in 1917 and showed with other innovators at the
Galerie
Dada, Zurich.
After the war Feininger joined the Novembergruppe,
through which he met Walter Gropius. When Gropius established the
Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919 he invited Feininger to become the first form
master in charge of the school’s printmaking workshop. Feininger’s
prints, especially his woodcuts, enhanced many Bauhaus publications,
including the cover of its original manifesto,
Cathedral of Socialism
(1919; New York, MOMA). Despite the demands of teaching, his skills as a
painter also evolved. His landscapes increasingly featured
architectural motifs that ranged from picturesque village buildings, as
in
Ober-Weimar (1921; Rotterdam, Boymans–van Beuningen), to monumental medieval churches, such as
Gelmeroda VIII
(1920–21; New York, Whitney). In these, he effectively coupled a
penetrating vision of the contemporary world characteristic of
Cubism
with romantic patches of colour that affirmed his personal reverence
for such subjects; moreover, the contrapuntal tenor of this imagery
reflected his enduring interest in music and, more specifically, the 13
fugues for organ that he composed during the same period.
In 1925, with Alexei Jawlenski, Paul Klee and Vasily
Kandinsky, Feininger formed the Blue four, which made its début at the
Charles Daniel Gallery in New York. When the Bauhaus moved to Dessau a
year later, Feininger followed as artist-in-residence without teaching
responsibilities, so that he was free to concentrate on painting. His
architectural landscapes, such as
Church of the Minorites II
(1926; Minneapolis, MN, Walker A. Cent.), and a growing number of
seascapes inspired by the Baltic or memories of the American coast, such
as the
Glorious Victory of the Sloop ‘Maria’ (1926), assumed a
physical and emotional grandeur unprecedented in his work. Important
recognition ensued when he was included in MOMA’s inaugural
Paintings by 19 Living Americans
(1929) and given a large solo exhibition by the Nationalgalerie, Berlin
(1931). However, later seascapes, some set at night with storm-tossed
ships (e.g.
Four-Mast Bark and Schooner, 1934; New York, Guggenheim), others strangely vacant except for small isolated figures (e.g.
Dunes at Eventide,
1936; New York, Guggenheim), seemed to express a deepening concern over
the forced closing of the Bauhaus, the spread of Fascism across Europe
and ultimately the Nazis’ public display of his own and other modern art
as ‘degenerate’ (
see Entartete Kunst).
In 1937 Feininger left Germany for California, where
he taught for a term at Mills College, Oakland, before resettling
permanently in New York. Except for murals designed for two buildings at
the World’s Fair in 1938,
Marine Transportation and
Masterpieces of Modern Art (destr.; sketches,
ARTnews,
1939), two years passed before he resumed painting. The rough texture,
grainy contours and relatively subdued colour of his late German style
at first carried into his American work, which varied from wistful
recollections of pre-war Europe, for example
Cathedral (Cammin) (1942; Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.), to tentative efforts to pictorialize the vast scale and new energy of his native city, as in
Manhattan I
(1940; New York, MOMA). Encouraged by Curt Valentin and by major prizes
from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Worcester Art
Museum, MA, Feininger’s confidence gradually returned. By 1944, the year
of his joint retrospective with Marsden Hartley at MOMA, his New York
imagery, for example in
Manhattan, The Tower (1944; San
Francisco, CA, MOMA), showed a graphic purity and aerial radiance akin
to the mystical ‘white writing’ of his friend Mark Tobey. The following
summer he accepted his former Bauhaus colleague Josef Albers’s
invitation to serve as guest instructor at
Black Mountain College,
Lake Eden, NC. Late in his career he was elected president of the
Federation of American Painters and Sculptors and honoured with
membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
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