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Lyonel Feininger Exhibition In the Demuth Foundation’s most ambitious exhibition to date, the museum gallery will showcase the work of Lyonel Feininger, an early modernist artist whose life and work spans two centuries and two continents. Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956), painter and printmaker, has long been recognized as a modernist master in both the United States and Germany. Peter Selz, professor emeritus of art history at Berkeley (the Foundation’s guest speaker at its annual meeting next month) has observed that Feininger “operated in the realm between realism and abstraction. In his search for the spiritual, he would find either mode by itself too restrictive.” Professor Selz has also observed, in his essay for the Foundation’s catalog for the exhibition, that Feininger and Demuth followed similar developments in their work. Indeed, the two men could have met — although there is no factual evidence of this — when Demuth accompanied artist Marsden Hartley to Germany in 1913. Hartley knew Feininger at the time since they were equally represented — five paintings each — in a “First German Autumn Salon.” It seems unlikely that Demuth would have missed this first international exhibition of avant-garde work. Born in New York City in 1871, Feininger went to Germany to study violin and composition at the age of sixteen, but soon shifted his attention to art. On a trip to Paris in 1911 he met a number of avant-garde artists and discovered cubism and futurism which became major influences on his work. As an artist Feininger first found financial success as a caricaturist and cartoonist before he was known as a painter. In 1913 he was invited to exhibit with the Blue Rider, a group of German expressionist artists whose members included Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Franz Marc. Appointed by Walter Gropius, Feininger taught drawing and painting and supervised the graphic workshop at the Bauhaus for fifteen years until it was closed by the Nazis in the 1933. Like many avant-garde artists in Germany, he was subject to Nazi persecution and left for the United States with his family in 1936. In 1938 Feininger settled in New York, and by 1944 the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art offered him his first extensive exhibition. Feininger’s work was widely exhibited throughout the 1940s and 1950s in the United States and Germany. He remained in New York until his death in 1956. The exhibition in the Demuth Museum is comprised of 21 works on paper completed over a forty-one year period, 1914-1955. They have been loaned by the Achim Moeller Fine Arts, Ltd., in New York, who is compiling the Feininger catalogue raisonne. The exhibition itself has been made possible by a grant from the Richard C. Von Hess Foundation. The works will be on display April 4 – May 25, with an opening reception scheduled for Friday evening, April 4th, from five until seven o’clock to coincide with Lancaster’s “First Friday” program. A brochure will be available.-------- TT
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