Lyonel Feininger

Born in New York in 1871, Lyonel Feininger only became a painter late in life after working as a caricaturist for a long time. After training at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Hamburg and the Königliche Akademie der Künste Berlin, he began drawing for the "Humoristische Blätter" in 1889 and became the most sought-after caricaturist in Germany.

He only took up painting at the age of 36. His striking paintings and works on paper depict landscapes, villages and towns, buildings and people in an abstract manner, whereby his architectural compositions in particular, with their prismatically broken, merging forms and delicate colors, are characteristic of his work. In 1912, Feininger met the painters of the Expressionist artists' association "Brücke" around Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and took part in the First German Autumn Salon at the "Der Sturm" gallery the following year together with the artists of the "Blaue Reiter". Further exhibitions followed at the Galerie Arnold in Dresden (1914) and the "Neue Kunst Hans Goltz" gallery in Munich (1918). In November 1918, Feininger joined the "November Group". In 1919, he was appointed by Walter Gropius as head of the graphic workshop at the State Bauhaus in Weimar and remained a Bauhaus master until 1932, finally in Dessau from 1926.

When the National Socialists seized power in Germany, Feininger moved with his family to New York, where he worked as a freelance painter. Shortly after his departure from Germany, 32 of his works were shown in the "Degenerate Art" exhibition in Munich, a total of 378 works were confiscated from public collections and his art was officially degraded as "degenerate".

In the USA too, Feininger remained true to the motifs of his former homeland and supplemented them with new works of modern "skyscraper" architecture. Feininger dies in New York at the age of 84.