Canadian Art

• Home
• Online
• Features

Lyonel Feininger: Seeing from a Different Angle

The recent Lyonel Feininger retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York was notable for its interrogations into associations between place and artistry. Although perhaps best known for his contributions to the Bauhaus (he was the only one to have taught at the famous art school from its inception in 1919 to its close in 1933) and thus most likely to be recognized as a German artist, Feininger was born in New York, and had ties to America throughout his life. He did cartoon work for the Chicago Tribune at the turn of the century, and he returned to Manhattan in the 1930s in retreat from the Nazis who, unsurprisingly, called his work degenerate and ultimately confiscated a large portion of it.

It stands to reason, then, that the Whitney subtitled its Feininger exhibition—the first retrospective of his work in New York in 45 years—“At the Edge of the World,” as if the artist really only held citizenship in the realm of his own overactive imagination. Now, the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal is importing the show, which opens January 21, under the curiously place-specific subtitle, “From Manhattan to the Bauhaus.” It might also be called “From Manhattan to Montreal.”

Naturalizing the Feininger show wasn’t difficult, according to MBAM curator of modern art Anne Grace. “We had intended to do a Feininger show for a while,” she says in a phone interview, “and were excited to hear that the Whitney and curator Barbara Haskell were planning one. He is less known in Canada than he is in the States, but he is a first-rate 20th-century artist.”

Lyonel Feininger Uprising 1910 Courtesy Museum of Modern Art New York © Estate of Lyonel Feininger / SODRAC (2011) / photo © Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Obvious parallels can be made between the MBAM’s involvement with this project and its exhibition of another Germanic artist of the same era, Otto Dix. As with Feininger, the Dix show came to the MBAM in 2010 from a New York institution, the Neue Galerie. But the MBAM added its own spin, most dramatically through Dix’s portrait of Hugo Simons, which ended up in Montreal when the Jewish lawyer whose likeness it bore fled to the city, as Feininger had to New York, to escape the Nazis.

Feininger’s Montreal pedigree is less apparent, but, says Grace, “there are Feininger descendants living in Canada. The museum received a large donation of his son Andreas Feininger’s photographs in 2010, and they will be shown. There are also images his other son, T. Lux, took of the Bauhaus.” These images were not in the Whitney show.

Andreas Feininger Illinois Central Railroad Yards, Chicago 1941 Courtesy Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal

Most significant is the emphasis the MBAM is placing on Feininger’s musical compositions. Feininger’s renaissance-like creativity was, to be sure, on splendid view at the Whitney—paintings, drawings, comics, wooden sculptures, all vivacious and colourful—but his music was relegated to the margins, although it was the subject of “Bauhaus Bach,” a Carnegie Hall concert featuring three of the artist’s fugues amid a program of modernist orchestrations of Bach.

“We are bringing out Feininger’s vocation as a musician a bit more in part because we have a new concert hall and it will be the first major exhibition to open since the hall became open to the public,” says Grace. (The public concerts attached to the Montreal show are myriad, from klezmer to a fugues program similar to the Whitney’s.) “But we’re less modernist in our approach than the Whitney, more contextual. In the last section of the show, visitors will be able to hear a fugue composed by Feininger, and music he might have listened to.”

Lyonel Feininger Carnival in Arcueil 1911 Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago © Estate of Lyonel Feininger / SODRAC (2011) / photo © Art Institute of Chicago

Music was not a minor pursuit for the artist. The reason for his first move to Germany as a teen was to study music. (His father, Karl Feininger, was a prominent violinist and composer.) Most of his works bear evidence of what might be called a strongly musical sensibility. Grace points out that, in the 1920s, Feininger made statements about Bach being “present” in his paintings. But even in works created before that time, Feininger’s imagery is alive with rhythm and pattern. Selections from his comic-strip works, for instance, were among the most startlingly precocious pieces in the Whitney show. An antidote of sorts to his paintings, which are largely made through the generic prisms of expressionism and cubism, they are suffused with a droll, contemporary-looking anthropomorphism that seems at times to sing out. Art Spiegelman, who did a talk on Feininger for the Whitney, has described the artist’s work as having “a breathtaking formal grace unsurpassed in the history of the medium.”

Lyonel Feininger The Kin-der-Kids in The Chicago Sunday Tribune, April 29, 1906 Courtesy Museum of Modern Art New York © Estate of Lyonel Feininger / SODRAC (2011) / photo © Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource NY

Montreal, of course, is no stranger to comics culture (internationally respected publishers Drawn and Quarterly are headquartered there), and although the MBAM is not doing a scene-oriented event around its show, it is, says Grace, providing more examples of works from German periodicals, as well as original drawings of characters from Feininger’s Chicago Tribune comics Wee Willie Winkie’s World and The Kin-der-Kids. The MBAM will also exhibit Feininger’s lovely “notes on nature,” ex tempore drawings that show a knack for gesture and improvisation.

Again, one can draw parallels to Dix, who, although not strictly a comic artist, was so invested in caricature as to be considered a pioneer in the field. Grace, who helped curate the Dix show, is pleased with this and other overlaps, though also finds much richness in the differences.

Lyonel Feininger Bird Cloud 1926 Courtesy Harvard Art Museums / Busch-Reisinger Museum Cambridge © Estate of Lyonel Feininger / SODRAC (2011) / photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

“During the Weimar Republic, in contrast to Dix—who depicted the era’s street life and whatnot—Feininger turned inward. Music became more important. He became interested in the fugue for its ability to relay and touch on human emotion, but also for its contrapuntal structure, its design.

“His work can thus be aligned with Schopenhauer, or Kandinsky,” she says, citing two artists for whom concepts transcend context—whose main goal is to transport. “His is an emphasis on the spiritual dimension in art.”

Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.