If you plan on being in New York City between now and October 16 you'll want to see the Lionel Feininger Exhibit at the Whitney on Madison Avenue (Lionel Feininger:At the Edge of the World). The Whitney is the premier museum for American art, and it is fitting that they put on this major exhibition of Feininger. Lionel Feininger was born in New York but did most of his important work in Germany until Hitler forced him to return to New York in 1937. The Nazis confiscated 400 of his works, and he was included in the notorious Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) Exhibit that same year.
The Whitney Exhibit covers Feininger's entire career and puts his versatility as an artist on display. He was a first and foremost a painter, but was also a brilliant photographer, architect, illustrator (he drew cartoons for the Chicago Sunday Tribune), printmaker, woodcarver, and even composer - his 17 fugues will be performed this fall in New York.
His early paintings in Germany fall squarely in the Expressionist mold, depicting city scenes - often carnivals - teeming with people as buildings appear to lean in over them. Some of the recurring images of colorful musicians seem to anticipate Marc Chagall.
WIth Cubism, and then later with his relationship with Walter Gropius and the formation of the Bauhaus School, Feininger found his style that would secure his place in modernist painting. He had the sensibility of an architect and could distill a landscape or seascape into discreet building blocks of light and shadow. The crowded scenes of humanity of his Expressionist days gave way to paintings with one or several miniature, abstract angular figures intersecting with large translucent panes of color, reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich's tiny human forms beholding the vast expanse of nature's glory. And just as for Friedrich, painting for Feininger was primarily a spiritual endeavor, “a path to the intangibility of the divine.” In an earlier era Feininger would have been a builder of cathedrals, and, indeed some of his greatest paintings such as Barfüsserkirche II are of the interior of churches.
Feininger's seascapes and church interiors follow the same schema: harmonic planes of blue- or red-hued light punctuated with patches of shadow draw the eye upward to the vaulted sky-ceiling.
As the Whitney show presents, this schema would prevail for the two decades of Feininger's most productive period until he was forced to flee Germany.
Only after he returns to New York do we see some subtle changes in Feininger's painting. The artist focuses on two subjects: the skyline of Manhattan that surrounds him, and the Baltic Sea of his memory's eye. The blue paint of his Blauer Reiter days seems to dominate (blue being the color of spirituality -Kandinsky), but the paintings seem enveloped in shroud of mist with the edges of the light-panes bleeding into the deep sea. There is definitely a natural progression from Feininger's late paintings to the Abstract Expressionism that dominated the New York art scene at mid-century.
Feininger finally achieved recognition in the US in 1944 with a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where, appropriately, he was paired with the modernist painter from Maine - Marsden Hartley. Like Feininger, Hartley had discovered his artistic path with Der Blaue Reiter group in Munich before the Great War.
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