America discovers FEININGER

...They are near in spirit to the disarmingly naive illustrations of German fairy tales which I (like every child reared in Central Europe) devoured in my youth...

...For Feininger knew what so many younger men and women have conveniently forgotten: that the degree of control distinguishes painting as an art from mere pigment-obsession which leaves out the spiritual in man...

...Half a century later he was still searching for new solutions, for in his last recorded letter (dated January 3, 1956), he wrote: "During the summer I have consciously confined myself to new experiments and prepared for fresh . . . activity in painting . . ." He was fated to die ten days later...

...Like a medieval German mystic, he wrote to his wife, "What we see has to go through the process of transformation and crystallization," and "I have to destroy nature before I can begin to build her up again in my paintings...

...Music has gone far ahead of painting in its organization and discipline . . . I always hear music...

...An extensive Feininger exhibition toured the United States in 1959 and 1960 and went to England and finally to Germany, where Feininger spent two-thirds of his long life...

...He began German Gothic drawings and paintings after terminating his contracts with newspapers and magazines...

...His works are halos drawn around breathing reality...

...Among his writings is a significant passage where he compares his work to the most rigorous of all, arts: "My lines are the equivalents of notes . . . each in its exact place...

...For Feininger, subsequently, has been described to me as a shy, uncommunicative person, who never mixed with people, never went to parties, rarely spoke to anyone outside his family circle...

...They do not give complete images—everything is in flux, though the direction is maintained and the movement circumscribed...

...He did not live what is called a colorful life (often a euphemistic term for a self-destructive mode of living...

...After the war, he was among the progressive artists who founded an Arbeitsrat fuer Kunst, an artists' committee to "reestablish the unity of the disrupted arts...

...He was close to forty and still dissatisfied with what he had produced when he wrote: "I search in vain for a single work of mine which could last," and, "My paintings are the battlefield on which I try to find clarification for myself...

...Marc once wrote: "The world is full of suffocation . . . . What can one do to attain happiness except give up everything and escape...

...he distilled the significant from an appearance...

...I do not know whether the late British critic, Roger Fry, was acquainted with Feininger's work...

...Moreover, in small, but carefully arranged memorial shows, New York's Willard Gallery has, year after year, demonstrated its unshakable faith in a man whose works, physically small and restrained, are easily overshadowed by flashier artists...

...Feininger's story is a most touching one, for it was relatively late in life that he managed to embark on the spiritually rewarding, but economically hazardous, career of a painter...

...But Feininger did not follow them in their destruction of material objects to the logical end...

...While he learned to speak and write German perfectly, English was of course his native tongue...

...However, when Feininger left Nazi Germany for America, all critics here, forgetting this incident, generously hastened to assure him that no one had ever considered him anything but an American artist...

...He felt that his creative gifts were not used sufficiently, and he finally decided to abandon pictorial journalism and to try to make a living as a free artist...

...He discovered Pomerania, that austere fog-ridden strip of land bordered by the Baltic where he spent many summers sailing and working...

...He bestowed his praise upon artists who "do not seek to imitate form, but to create form, not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life...

...Upon his return to America in 1936, he fell in love with the geometry of Manhattan's grid of straight streets, with the mystery of its sharp-angled towers looming towards the sky...

...In the two men, there was the same yearning to reach the "soul" of things, a longing for the incomprehensive and infinite, a metaphysical thirst not to be restrained by limited horizons...

...He loved the harbors and dunes in the faint light of the moon and the towers and narrow streets of old towns...

...Feininger "transfigurated" and "de-materialized" a scene without ever sacrificing the point of departure...

...Traces of the old Maerchen element can be seen in his early works, especially in the playful, whimsical cartoons...

...In the 1920's, a German critic pronounced Feininger "urdeutsch" and dismissed the fact that he was born in New York as a mere caprice of fate, yet the Hitlerites attacked the artist as an "alien" producing "degenerate" paintings...

...Feininger himself wanted no part of a controversy that seemed utterly senseless to him: "What is the artist, if not connected with the universe...

...Most of those who have idolized Pollock and his associates for their spontaneity in handling paint have been unable to love the precision and clarity in feininger's drawings, watercolors, and oils...

...In the non-objective age people had little use for vistas of Gothic churches, the Baltic shoreline, or the skyscrapers of New York...

...While he became known for his contribution to satirical papers in Germany and to the Chicago Tribune, life as a caricaturist did not satisfy him...

...He was born in New York in 1871...

...When Feininger was sixteen, he was sent to Germany to study music...

...Another fact that militated against him was the rise of nonobjective art...

...Feininger's art is as abstract as classical music in which a simple straight melody is always audible...

...Though his work indulges in abstraction—he never refrained from abridging and summarizing for the sake of better and stronger design—Feininger always consulted nature, always regarded art as a controlled interplay between the visible stimuli offered by life and nature and the creative processes of the unconscious mind...

...Those words apply perfectly to the philosophical Expressionist, the American Feininger, whose genius is, at last, being recognized in his native country...

...I want an equally disciplined art...

...The stillness, the peace and quiet produced by the harmonious equilibrium between horizontal and vertical, tend to conceal an emotional intensity gradually tamed, yet never attenuated in a life-long struggle into which only his spontaneously written letters have given us a rare , insight...

...As sensitive an individual as Feininger could not spend fifty of his eighty-seven years in Germany without sending roots deep into the country's cultural soil...

...Ostracized by the Third Reich, he lived long enough to see the victory of sanity, and he was honored with several exhibitions in Germany during the decade preceding his death...

...Though he loved music, and subsequently achieved some recognition as a composer of organ music, he knew from the outset that he was destined to become a painter...

...Or, as Feininger put it in his disarming modesty, "I don't paint objects, but rather the space around objects...

...He obtained permission to study art, first in Hamburg, then in Berlin, and spent a fruitful half-year in Paris, where he became acquainted with the newer trends.,But to support his family (he married in 1901 and soon became a father), he had to earn his living as a cartoonist...

...Unfortunately, during the last decade of Feininger's life, America was seized by a mania for raw, hot color thickly splashed or casually dripped on canvas...

...In the past five years, however, the stature of Feininger has grown so much in the public mind that no one would now dare to exclude him from a list of the dozen foremost American painters...

...he made his object grow outward as a crystal grows...

...This reserve was, in part, responsible for his being relatively unknown in the United States...

...And now we have the first substantial book about him in English, Lyonel Feininger, by Hans Hess (Harry N. Abrams), which is valuable not only for the author's remarkably deep penetration into the character of the artist's work, but also for the oeuvre catalogue, recording more than five hundred oil paintings, and a comprehensive bibliography...

...His sole concern, next to that for his family, was for his art...

...Here is an early one, written from Paris in 1906 (when the painter was only thirty-five): "The artist should be an experimenter, seek out logical and constructive solutions—create synthetically pure forms...

...Apparently, even the lofty realm of art is not free of the champions of nationalism...

...Whereas the Cubists would completely dissolve the actual elements of a scene in the design, Feininger, with all his angular simplifications, retained enough of a reflection of the eternal world so that a Caspar David Friedrich, returned to life, might recognize the North German churches by their soaring height, gigantic shafts, and ribbed vaultings and flying buttresses...

...Among his contemporaries, Feininger was, perhaps, closest to his colleague Franz Marc, an associate of the Blaue Reiter artists' group to which Feininger belonged for a short time...

...It is significant that Jackson Pollock's death in 1956 caused a much greater stir than Feininger's death the same year...

...Associated with the Bauhaus Academy in Weimar, he was among the first artists to be attacked as a modernist by the Nazis when, years before Hitler's seizure of power, his works, along with those of Barlach and Klee, were removed from an exhibition in Weimar...

...Feininger, the quiet, withdrawn, solitary artist, became the target of controversy: whether he ought to be considered a German or an American artist...

...Hence, if he can be pigeon-holed at all, one might place him among the German Romanticists, for this strange man who grew up among locomotives, steamships, and "Els," was spiritually at home in the age of stage coaches and sailing vessels...

...His more personal drawings were often rejected in favor of his less original work...

...Nevertheless, in his art he was more of an early Nineteenth Century German-Romanticist than of a machine-obsessed modern New Yorker...

...They incite dreams—to finish with the soul what the artist had begun with his inadequate tools...

...Ironically, in 1929, when New York's Museum of Modern Art exhibited him among Nineteen Living Americans, protests were heard here against the inclusion of this "foreigner" working in a "foreign idiom...

...He praised those artists who "make images which by the clearness of their logical structure, and by their closely-knit unity of texture . . . appeal to our disinterested and contemplative imagination with something of the same vividness as the things of actual -life appeal to our practical activities...

...He would not have denied, though, that there are national inspirations and influences that, high above imperialism and chauvinism, penetrate to the core of a creative personality...

...Feininger believed that coolness of mind and color, as well as geometry corresponding to the strict architectural pattern of a fugue, would channelize rapturous self-intoxication and the overflow of passionate enthusiasm...

...Before World War I, he was affiliated with Germany's advanced Blue Rider group...

...If an enormous life-work can be summarized in a few words, Feininger created order in a world lacking order...

...Hence, "at thirty-six, as a cheerful old man," he started to paint "with a locomotive-like passion eight or ten hours daily...

...Their warmth is not the quick fire that brightens without providing comfort, but rather the glowing of coals that burn eternally and give never-ending delight...

...Feininger plucked this flower, and it led him into the world of fantasy...

...They would characterize superbly his paintings that are midway between reality and abstraction, precision and dream, giving us, as it were, the astral bodies of things rather than the perishable entities...

...From 1933 on, he was among the artists whose works were held up to ridicule by the Nazis' Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibitions...

...It might be pointed out that the name of this group—Blue Rider—unmistakably linked them with the miracleproducing blue flower which, according to a German fairy tale, the shepherd, unaware of its magic powers, pins to his shirt, to be led by it to discover a hidden treasure...

...Superficially, the Cubists did the same thing...

...His life is interwoven with the fabric of German civilization from 1888 to the advent of Hitlerism...

...In 1888 he wrote to a friend that he was "so determined" as to his future profession "that life would seem not worth struggling through' if I could not follow this calling...

...His parents, of German origin, were musicians and insisted that their son follow in their footsteps, although "Charles Leonell," as the child was baptized, soon revealed an unusual talent for drawing and an insatiable appetite for the sights of New York, such as the Second Avenue "El," the forest of masts on the Hudson and the East River, and the canyons of downtown Manhattan...

...To use the title of one of his water colors, he was a "Ship with Sails of No Nation Whatever...

...Yet while Feininger's innate noblesse prevented him from draining off his emotion in wild ecstasy, his drawings, paintings, and prints are far from cold...

...To the average German he was always a Yankee...

...Those who went to see New York's latest Feininger show last spring could not help admiring the admirable balance in his art, a firmness that is rare today as one artist after another seeks "freedom" in unrestrained abandon...

...His biography is brief...

...Learning that he was the painter, Lyonel Feininger, I had an urge to walk up to him and say, "I have been an admirer of your work for many, many years . . ." But a feeling of awe stopped me, and I am glad it did...

...He never followed his friends Klee, Kandinsky, or Albers into complete abstraction...

...His sense of magic helped him create his most celebrated canvases— those showing small figures on the shore looking across wide spaces, sometimes dotted with ships, the distant horizons conjuring up the infinity of space, the great unknown lying beyond...

...To characterize his mature work, I must pay tribute to the Nineteenth Century German painter, Caspar David Friedrich who, long before Feininger was born, anticipated the later man's rejection of the materialistic civilization he witnessed around him...