Review of the exhibition of the Bahaus classic Lionel Feininger at the Frankfurt Schirn Kunsthalle

The Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt is showing a large-scale exhibition of Lionel Feininger (1871–1956). The Bauhaus classic, who remained in the shadow of his more famous contemporaries, appears not only as a first-class painter and graphic artist, but also as a photographer – this part of his heritage has recently been discovered. Watched Alexey Mokrousov.

Like many outstanding artists, Lionel Feininger fluctuated along with the line of the century. He started as a political cartoonist, taught at the holy of holies of new art, the German Bauhaus, where Walter Gropius was the first to call him as a master, and ended his life almost as an abstract artist. The grotesque style of early painting, numerous images of locomotives, ships and cathedrals, as well as “side hobbies”, from children’s toys to photography, make Feininger recognizable and unique at the same time. His exhibition at the Schirn-Kunsthalle breaks attendance records: the success is compared to the success of the recent Frankfurt retrospectives of Marc Chagall and Edvard Munch.

Feininger’s biography left many questions – at least even what nationality to indicate in the appropriate column. In many encyclopedias he is called an American artist, and formally this is true: he was born and died in New York. But in American newspapers at the beginning of the century, Feininger the cartoonist was presented as a German author. There is also nothing to object to: the flowering of his talent occurred during his decades of life in Germany. Coming from a family of musicians with German roots, he went from Manhattan to Leipzig to study violin, but ended up first at the School of Industry and Crafts in Hamburg, then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, and then at all Colarossi Academy in Paris, where many studied, from Amedeo Modigliani and Maximilian Voloshin to Konstantin Somov and Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva. They didn’t have time to instill in him the academic credentials; Feininger became a professional through his work as a cartoonist for the best Berlin magazines, such as “Veselye Leaflets”.

The genre was on the rise, for the turn-of-the-century generation it combined political satire, stand-up comedy and comics in one package. However, Feininger also drew comics themselves; his second trip to Paris in 1906, where he began painting in oils, was financed by a Chicago newspaper, which ordered him a series of comics from the “capital of the world.” The exhibition now shows large-format drawings for magazines, and next to them are paintings that “grew” from them, “literally” repeating the plots and proportions of the graphics. On one of the canvases there is a lanky figure reminiscent of the author himself; in fact, the magazine published the drawing as a parody of media mogul William Hearst, the future hero of Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane.

The influence of caricatures on the development of the American-German painter is one of the sections of the retrospective at the Frankfurt Schirn-Kunsthalle, which brings together about 160 works from private collections and museums, including a dozen American ones. One of the artist’s most famous cycles is also shown with a church in the Thuringian village of Helmeroda near Weimar – Feininger captured it many times, he covered dozens of kilometers on a bicycle for his favorite motifs, thanks to him these places fell in love with tourists. Today in Thuringia there are two cycle routes named after him; Other commemorative gestures include a postage stamp and an asteroid named after him.

At some point, he became involved in toys, and in 1913 he became so interested in creating them that he was going to start their industrial production. The contract with the Munich company was prevented by the war, but in 1919 Feininger, together with his three children, planed dolls and houses; some are now on display. One of the multi-figure compositions – it contains 68 painted figures and wooden buildings – is called “City at the End of the Earth,” a reference to the most popular early-century novel “The Other Side” by Alfred Kubin, an artist and writer with whom Feininger corresponded intensively for several years.

In general, many were friends with him, including his Bauhaus neighbor Paul Klee; together with Wassily Kandinsky and Alexei Jawlensky they created the Blue Four association. Feininger ran a printing workshop at the Bauhaus. The forced dissolution of the school after the Nazis came to power did not force him to immediately leave Germany; at one time he seemed to be trying to find his new place in it, but exclusion from the Union of German Artists in 1936 predetermined his future. In 1937, Feininger finally left Germany. At the exhibition “Degenerate Art” in Munich, 8 of his paintings, 13 engravings and one watercolor were shown; In total, 400 of his works were confiscated from German museums.

There were no photographs among the confiscated items—only a few knew about Feininger’s long-term hobby, including his son Andreas, who himself became a famous photographer. The exhibition featured prints from different years from the photographic heritage that was only recently opened to researchers and the public. The artist’s archive contains about 20 thousand photographs, negatives and transparencies; many photographs directly resonate with his paintings and graphic works, and above all, with his interest in architecture.

In many ways, Feininger remained in the shadow of his more famous colleagues. He seems to have preferred the pleasure of making art to radical quests – and his enjoyment of the play of shapes and colors is still felt today. Otherwise there would have been no stamp, no asteroid, no Frankfurt retrospective.