View: Brooding Sky - 1946
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Lyonel Feininger

Nationality / Dates: 1871-1956

An interesting aspect of American art is to be seen in the number of artists who, though they are Americans by birth or adoption, are generally regarded as bona fide members of other national schools. For instance, Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, and James McNeill Whistler are often considered English painters. Closer to our own day is the example of Lyonel Feininger who was born in New York City in 1871, left the United States in 1887 to study music in Germany, and eventually returned in 1936. In that long interval away he gave op the study of music for art, studied painting in Berlin and Paris, and made his living as a cartoonist and illustrator. In Paris in 1911 he made the acquaintance of the Cubists and Robert Delaunay. In 1913 he was invited to exhibit with the Blue Rider group which included Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee. From 1923 to 1925 he was a member of the faculty at the Bauhaus at Dessau, Germany, and in 1931 was given an exhibition at the National Gallery in Berlin. After 1933 he was included in exhibitions of "degenerate art" sponsored by the National Socialists.

All of this made Feininger a prominent figure in German art and his repatriation was not accomplished without difficulty. After his return, Feininger's preoccupation with his favorite themes, architecture, the sea, and ships, continued but with a softer, more atmospheric quality, a loosening of the Cubist framework that had governed his earlier work. City Moon is a particularly poetic example. It is interesting to compare this work with Georgia O'Keeffe's New York, Night. City Moon affirms that Feininger was indeed a poet, or, as he thought of himself, a musician transposing reality into an ideal abstraction.

Other Works:

Brooding Sky, 1946, watercolor on paper

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