LIONEL FEININGER'S CUBISM

Zirchow VI

LIONEL FEININGER’S CUBISM

by Joan K. Yanni

 Zirchow VI (46.38) is again on view.  The cubist painting by Lyonel Feininger has been installed in the 20^th-century gallery near the auditorium corridor.

The painting is not the static cubism we often associate with Braque or Picasso, but a dynamic study in tones of green accented by black, beige and gray architectural facades, arranged so that the eye travels upward to a brick-red spire of a gothic church tower. The work gives the impression of diagonal forms in space—sharp, precise angles and flat planes which fit together to present Zirchow, a medieval German town. Alois J. Schardt, Feininger’s biographer, has called the contrast between the prismatic green forms at the bottom of the painting and the thrusting red tower “a symbol of man’s striving toward security and freedom.”

Feininger (1871-1956) was born in New York to a father who was a professional violinist and a mother who was a concert pianist.  He was trained as a violinist, and as a teenager went to Germany to study music. Once in Hamburg, however, he enrolled in a drawing class that awakened an interest in art and led to further classes at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin and the Académie Colarossi in Paris. He did not completely abandon music, however, and throughout his life he composed and played. 

From 1893 to 1907 he was a prominent illustrator and satirical cartoonist for German periodicals.  His work also appeared in the United States, first for Harpers Round Table then in the comic strips “The Kin-der-Kids” and “Wee Willie Winkie’s World" for the Chicago Sunday Tribune. He developed a flat, decorative style that he carried over to his early paintings.

Feininger spent two years in Paris in the early 1900s and became acquainted with avant-garde painters Jules Pascin and Robert Delauney. In 1907 he began serious painting, and even though he returned to Germany, his work reflected the influences of Van Gogh, Cézanne, and particularly Delauney.

Most of his early oil paintings are street scenes with numerous figures that combine a sensitive use of line and shape with the bold colors favored by the Fauves and his fellow Berlin Secessionists.

He was first introduced to Cubism at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911. Their method of overlaying planes and echoing forms fascinated him, though he concentrated on landscapes rather than interiors. Back in Germany he joined with major German Expressionist groups including Die Brucke and Der Blaue Reiter with whom he exhibited in 1913.

By then his work had developed into cubist fragmentation, but he broke up surfaces more dynamically and less analytically than many of the early cubists. He experimented with light, space and color, sometimes picturing movement through sequences of planes as was done by the Futurists.  (Remember Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash?)

 In 1918 he began working with woodcuts, a medium he was to use for some of his most spontaneous and delightful work.  Around this time he met Walter Gropius, the architect who established the Bauhaus, the center for design studies, in Weimar. Gropius asked Feininger to join the faculty and to head its first printmaking shop. Feininger’s prints, especially woodcuts, enhanced many Bauhaus publications. Here Feininger’s skills as a painter evolved, and his landscapes often featured architectural motifs. Feininger remained with the school as instructor and later as artist-in-residence until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933.

By 1921 he had begun to paint monumental canvases of soaring steeples and expansive seascapes in which natural forms dissolved into planes of light; his style combined expressionism and cubism. In 1924, with Alexei Jawlensky, Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky, Feininger joined the Blue Four, which made its debut at the Charles Daniel Gallery in New York. Their work was exhibited widely. Feininger’s change from teacher to artist-in-residence at the Bauhaus gave him more time to paint, and important recognition in the United States came when he was included in MOMA’s Paintings by 19 Living Americans in 1929. During the next years he was honored by major exhibitions in New York and in Germany. Some of his works at this time reflected his continuing love for music; indeed, he composed 13 fugues for organ during these years.

His paintings in the mid-1930s had begun to show an unsettling depression, attributable to the spread of Fascism over Europe. His successes in Germany were ended when the Nazis displayed his and other modern art in a show of “degenerates”.and banned them from museums. Some of Feininger’s paintings, including Zirchow VI, were sold at auction in Zurich.

In 1936 Feininger left Germany and began teaching at Mills College in California, then resettled permanently in New York City.  But except for doing murals for two buildings at the World’s Fair in 1938, he did not paint again for two years.

Transplanting himself at 66 had not been easy, but during the 1940s and early 50s he had a burst of creative energy.  The rough texture and subdued color of his late German work had carried over into his first American paintings, but he began to personalize the energy and forms of his adopted city, as in Manhattan I. Encouraged by Kurt Valentin and by major prizes from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Worcester Museum of Art in Massachusetts, his confidence gradually returned. His early, superimposed planes were replaced by freely applied color areas, spontaneous, darting lines, and a radiance of color.  In 1945 he accepted his former Bauhaus colleague Josef Albers’s invitation to serve as guest instructor at Black Mountain College, in North Carolina. Late in his career he was elected president of the Federation of American Painters and Sculptors and honored with membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in New York City in 1956.

Source: Curatorial files, Grove Encyclopedia of Art, Encyclopedia of American Art.