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.

It was not until the age of 36 that he took up painting. His striking paintings and works on paper depict landscapes, villages, and cities, as well as buildings and people, in an abstract manner; his architectural compositions, in particular, with their prismatically refracted, intermingling forms and delicate colors, work a defining stylistic feature of his work . In 1912, Feininger met the painters of the Expressionist artists’ groupBrückeled by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and the following year he participated, alongside the artists of “Der Blaue Reiter,” in the First German Autumn Salon at the “Der Sturm” gallery. Further exhibitions followed at the Arnold Gallery 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 arts workshop at the State Bauhaus in Weimar and remained a Bauhaus master until 1932, ultimately working in Dessau from 1926 onward.

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.