CHAPTER 2
- Lyonel Feininger at the Thyssen: Prismatic Cubism and Architectures of Light
Lyonel Feininger at the Thyssen‑Bornemisza Museum Madrid brings together prismatic Cubism, Bauhaus echoes and shimmering architectures of light, revealing a painter who bridged two continents and two centuries with his very own modern vision
Lyonel Feininger (New York, 1871–1956) was very much a child “between centuries”, a man who split his life between two continents. Born into a family of musicians, he crossed the Atlantic at sixteen to study violin in Hanover. In the trade‑fair city, however, the strings of his instrument fell silent. Instead, pencils and brushes came to life in his hands and pushed him towards learning the art of painting at schools of arts and crafts in Germany, then with Ernst Hancke in Berlin and Filippo Colarossi in Paris.
By the end of the nineteenth century, The Chicago Sunday Tribune and various German magazines were publishing popular caricatures and comic strips by this witty thirty‑something, who could comfortably support two daughters from a brief first marriage and a son with Julia Berg, his great love for forty‑eight years. When Feininger visited Notre‑Dame in Paris and Cologne Cathedral, he was captivated by those skeletons of columns, arches and ribs that held up sublime ribbed vaults. It was surely then that the sunbeams piercing the polychrome stained glass of both cathedrals inspired him to emulate, in paint, the ethereal scattering of light in Gothic windows, raising cities built of razor‑sharp planes, where light splinters streets, bridges and towers into colourful squares, rectangles and rhombuses. This is how, in 1913, his prismatic Cubism was born.
In 1917 the avant‑garde Berlin gallery “Der Sturm” hosted the first solo exhibition of Lyonel Feininger.
Feininger and a turbulent twentieth century
- In 1919 Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar. Lyonel Feininger was appointed the first master of the printmaking workshop, a key position in the early days of the great German modernist avant‑garde.
- Feininger also designed the cover of the Bauhaus Manifesto: a famous Expressionist woodcut of a cathedral that became the movement’s iconic image.
- From 1919 to 1925, Lyonel Feininger was a leading Bauhaus painter in Weimar, heading the printmaking workshop and shaping the school’s graphic language
- In 1933, the year the Bauhaus closed its doors under pressure from the Nazi regime, Feininger’s work was branded “degenerate art” and lumped together with that of Kirchner, Marc, Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Beckmann, Kokoschka and others.
- In 1937 Feininger and his family went into permanent exile in New York. He would never return to Germany.
- His return to the United States was traumatic: at sixty‑eight he had to rebuild his life from scratch.
- He had left behind a New York of carriages and horses. He came back to one of automobiles, trains and high‑speed modern life. But his art would help him adapt. From the window of his studio on East 22nd Street, Feininger photographed the street, drew Manhattan and painted its boundless skyscrapers.
- In 1956 Lyonel Feininger died of a heart attack in his New York home.
Feininger and art
– Lyonel Feininger was a radically versatile artist: graphite, watercolor, ink, comics, drawing, woodcuts, painting, photography and even experiments with projected slides (thousands of which are preserved at the Harvard Art Museums).
– His wood engravings paved the way for his prismatic Cubism, which organized forms and spaces through planes, edges and transparencies, “carving” geometric images out of light.
– Iconographically, Feininger’s painting moves between four poles:
- 1894 to 1914: playfulness and fantasy. A young Feininger creates comic strips, toys, ghosts (“ghosties”), female figures, mannequins that inject veins of fantasy into all his later periods. Like Miró, Feininger never really broke with his childhood.
- 1913 to 1937: architecture and the Gothic. Cathedrals, churches, arches, villages with towers are not just buildings but signs of tradition, spirituality and cultural continuity. The Gothic becomes a symbol of identity, especially for the “German” Feininger of the war and Bauhaus years.
- 1913 to 1937: sea, horizon and romantic distance. His seascapes, boats and boundless fields are also built from planes, yet they exhale a powerful atmosphere that is both romantic and modern.
- 1940 to 1952: the modern city and Manhattan skyscrapers. Feininger captures New York in intersections, traffic and skyscrapers pointing to infinity, which speak of his astonishment and confusion before a metropolis that had colored his memories in Germany and now, so radically changed, greets him as a stranger visiting it for the first time.
Today, three major Lyonel Feininger paintings in Madrid can be seen at the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum.
Let us return now to the end of the blog on Joan Miró at the Thyssen; from Miró’s Painting to Feininger’s White Man (in the Carmen Thyssen‑Bornemisza Collection), which I described as a self‑portrait – though perhaps it fits better as a self‑projection or, why not, a self‑caricature exploring the relationship between person and city. In any case, I invite you to take a closer look:
Lyonel Feininger. The White Man (1907). A “gringo in a Stetson” in the big city
The date of the painting explains the work and its artistic and social backdrop. Here is why:
- 1907 is the artist’s “year of change”. The successful cartoonist decides to take the definitive leap into oil painting. He is living in Paris, soaking up the heady creative freedom of Montmartre.
- The political climate is deceptive, like the calm before the storm. There is apparent stability and industrial growth in Wilhelmine Germany and the French Third Republic. Yet beneath the surface, European powers are quietly preparing for the Great War.
- Social and economic context: the Belle Époque bubbles merrily along. The bourgeoisie and urban economy are booming. Paris is the centre of luxury consumption and the entertainment industry (illustrated magazines, theatres), which allowed Feininger to live off his drawings before turning to “pure” art.
The White Man is a kind of missing link between Feininger the draughtsman and the future Bauhaus master. His long, spectral figure strides down an alley. The height of the white man – to whom the lack of perspective gives a gigantic scale, on a par with the orange building at the back and towering over the green houses around him – signals a complete abstraction from everyday reality. The alley’s electric greens, together with the pink‑orange of the rear building, “side with” the Fauves and the Expressionists of Dresden.
The tiny black‑clad figure that Feininger highlights between the white man’s legs might be his “other self”, the shadow of the past trying to trip up the white man as he marches towards creative progress. During his years as a satirical illustrator, Feininger often used strong black contrasts set against pale figures. As a curious footnote, The White Man grows out of a satirical/political drawing entitled The Lament of Mr. Hearst, whose exact target and meaning experts still argue over.
Lyonel Feininger. Architecture II (1921): Music in the Air
- 1921 is Feininger’s “Bauhaus year”. By now settled in Weimar, he is teaching as “Formmeister” in the Bauhaus print workshop and consolidating his architectural language in both wood and canvas. The city becomes his great formal laboratory, somewhere between Gothic mysticism and musical order in composition.
- Political climate
The young Weimar Republic is living through a fragile peace, overshadowed by the Treaty of Versailles and the reparations fixed in 1921. A succession of putsches and uprisings is, for the moment, behind it. Parliament is functioning again, but nationalist resentments remain, and a weak democracy struggles to contain them. It feels like a tense calm that heralds new storms.
- Social and economic context
Germany is dealing with the hangover of war: poverty, unemployment and family breakdown coexist with the vitality of large urban centres. In 1921 the inflationary spiral begins, eroding savings and wages and fuelling both social anxiety and, paradoxically, an intense cultural effervescence, visible in cafés, cabarets, publishers and avant‑garde schools such as the Bauhaus.
Feininger leaves behind his then‑habitual crystalline architectures to explore a city built out of colour contrasts: neat, friendly facades set against three oval‑bodied pedestrians who advance like notes along an urban stave. Feininger, a violinist and composer, understands those straight facades not as impenetrable walls but as vibrating musical staves, where planes alternate and interact as in a Bach fugue.
The pedestrians, who do not look at one another, are not the dehumanized city‑dwellers of Kirchner or Grosz but a kind of polyphony: each figure follows its own inner melody, yet all contribute to a larger harmony.
The black windows introduce a disquieting counterpoint. Their darkness hints at threatening silhouettes, foretelling that life within the city is less transparent than the painter’s luminous palette would have us believe.
The drawn‑back red curtain is theatrical in every sense. Rather than quote a movie set, it links into a long pictorial tradition in which the curtain reveals or conceals a symbolic stage: from certain royal portraits by Velázquez or figures framed in windows by Dou, through, for example, a self‑portrait by Beckmann, to Boldini’s Red Curtain. In Architecture II the red curtain draws back the stage of the modern city, inviting the viewer to contemplate a dazzling symphony of lines and colors – while the black windows warn that every urban harmony hides its darker corners.
Lyonel Feininger and The Lady in Mauve (1922). Geometric solitude
The political, social and economic circumstances have not improved since Architecture II. Feininger is still working as a Bauhaus Formmeister, alongside kindred spirits such as Klee, Kandinsky and Moholy‑Nagy.
This painting shows Feininger in full maturity, speaking in a clear Bauhaus register.
The city that receives the Lady is clean, geometric, almost ideal: a pared‑down architecture that brushes against aesthetic perfection. The female figure does not burst in and tear the space apart; she blends into it through translucent planes that fuse her with the urban fabric. There is no Fauvist wrenching‑apart, no chromatic violence, but a spiritual geometrization in which form distils the figure into musical notes.
The very low vantage point enlarges the Lady and stretches the height of the buildings, in a strategy of monumentality Feininger had been advocating since 1906: change the proportions, rather than simply scaling everything up.
The solitary, distinguished Lady in Mauve thus inserts herself into the surrounding architecture like a melancholy passer‑by within one of Feininger’s own musical compositions. In contrast to the chromatic tension of Architecture II, here blues, mauves and whites build a dream‑like atmosphere; color steps away from the Expressionism of, say, Die Brücke, and aligns itself with the artist’s personal state of mind, while the forms arise from firm strokes, drawn with severe, almost architectural lines.
Light beams and fractured planes break the figure into straight and oval geometries, as if an inner energy were running through both the Lady and her surroundings. The soft oil glazes recall the Gothic stained-glass Feininger so admired, and his memories of Paris: a city of filtered lights and elegant silhouettes seen in backlight, now transfigured into a polyphony of colour planes that take shape in the Lady in Mauve.
I take my leave of the Lady in Mauve. I cannot help thinking that, although in 1922 Feininger was devoted to applying a tectonic discipline to his street scenes – as if his pedestrians had to bow to the final structure of the painting – his elegant protagonist still conveys a muted sense of humanity in her solitary walk, one that, with a bit of luck, might yet lead her towards less systematized (and freer) realms.
