Whitney’s Feininger show takes art to the edge of the world
Some artists respond to the traumas of their time by engaging them; consider Goya’s “The Third of May” or Picasso’s “Guernica.” For others (Matisse comes to mind), art became a kind of sanctuary, a refuge for exploring the transcendent. Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) falls squarely in the second camp. His delicate Cubist images tell us nothing about his conflicted allegiances to both America and Germany during wartime, but much about an artistic temperament quivering between the avant-garde and the beatific.
The current retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum—the very first to display all aspects of his production—reveals his extraordinary range of interests. In addition to the familiar seascapes and views of churches, the exhibition includes cartoons, early expressionist paintings, watercolors, musical compositions, carved toys, photographs and a series of late, supple Manhattan cityscapes. Two somewhat contradictory aspirations run throughout: an enthusiasm for caricature and the exotic, and a longing for a mystical synthesis of art and nature.
Lyonel Feininger, Carnival in Arcueil, 1911 © Lyonel Feininger Family, LLC./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photograph © The Art Institute of Chicago
Born in Manhattan to musicians of German descent, Feininger was packed off to Germany at age 16 to study the violin. He was determined to pursue art instead, and his “temporary” stay lasted 50 years. The homesick artist always considered himself an American, and yet, as his career blossomed in Berlin—first as an illustrator, and then as a fine artist—he grew to prefer the German reverence for culture. Indeed, he later claimed that he would never have become an artist had he remained in the States. Exhibiting with both Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter movements, he eventually headed the Bauhaus graphics department. Finally, at age 66, he returned to the States under the gathering Nazi threat.
In 1907, Feininger had abandoned a highly successful career as a cartoonist to turn to painting. His earliest, Fauvism-inspired canvases in the exhibition are riots of color, barely contained by the same racing contours that had distinguished his cartoons. With their planar forms and crisp details, they bear more than a passing resemblance to Japanese woodcuts. In “Carnival” (1908), several figures—emerald blue-green, a diamond-patterned purple, a pallid pinkish-white—stride across a town square, their postures echoing one another with tight, intense variations. Contradictions of scale abound; one horn-player measures only a third of the height of the figure immediately behind, yet weightings of form and color make everything fit.
Feininger experienced another revelation during a 1911 trip to Paris: the Cubists, whose faceted dislocations fit naturally with his own investigations. In fact, almost every subsequent work in the show suggests Cubist influence. Many are poignant; in “Pier” (1912), the pale sproutings of ships’ sails rise evocatively above the horizon; “Calm at Sea III” (1929) deliciously captures the vibrant depth between two boats’ masts. But color was not Feininger’s foremost gift, and in later works his hues occasionally feel decorative, filling in rather than measuring intervals. We get appealingly stylized “pictures” of an isolated ship or bustling town square rather than the plastic enactment of it. (Gris or Braque would have rooted such scenes in animate color.) Another gallery devoted to Feininger’s toys revealed to me…well, toys: whimsical carvings of houses and trains with little of Picasso’s muscle or transforming insight.
Anther aspect of Feininger’s work, however, gets far too little attention. These are his early cartoons, which, displayed in a single side-gallery, are extraordinary. The characters that the artist conjured up for the comic strip “Kin-der-Kids” (appearing in the Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1906) are the wholly original creations of a true pioneer. His figures, squat and rounded or achingly thin—all set within craftily shaped panels—practically burst with their own plasticity, and with this plasticity comes character. Details proclaim, rather than merely denote—that is, a tiny, mouse-like face reacts to the ridiculously broad sweep of a hat; a foot so suddenly catches the narrowing flight of a leg that it seems a mile away.
The children in these cartoons have the wizened seriousness of the old; the old scamper with youthful enthusiasm. Feininger’s idiosyncratic humor comes through doubly in this medium combining text and image. His characters’ semi-sensical utterances (“Begorrah, ‘tis a poor sowl in dishtress!” mutters a chimneysweep, rescuing a child from a castor oil treatment) provide all the explication necessary in his strange, wild worlds.
Feininger’s genius for caricature didn’t transpose as naturally to painting as it had for Daumier (1808-1879). Of all the paintings in the exhibition, only “The White Man” (1907), his very first, shows an urgency of color equal to his drawings’; his hues in this canvas powerfully measure a figure soaring before the stolid, staggered structures behind. Having worked so long with commercial printing, did Feininger not fully grasp the possibilities of a painter’s palette? Or did he come to demand less complexity from the “high” art of painting than from the “low” art of illustration? We’ll never know, but “The White Man” marks the fascinating crossing point of two trajectories: the exotic urgency of his early work and the luminous solace of the late.
Lyonel Feininger
Through Oct. 16, Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., 212-570-3600.
