The Velocipede of Modernism

By Robert Hughes

Lyonel Feininger is one of those artists whose names evoke one kind of painting, and one only. Translucent planes carving up space like glass knives, suggesting churches, ice caves or winter seas--in Feininger, the symbolism of the German romantics, especially of Caspar David Friedrich, is passed through an illustrative language based on cubism. It is legible cubism, shorn of its ambiguities. Under the modern surface, there is always a hint of the sublime, the transcendental, perilously near to kitsch--Crystal Cathedral uplift, the fount of much hotel-lobby art and many a "serious" get-well card.

In the last years of his life, Feininger (1871-1956) was about as popular as any modern artist in America could then be; and despite his German name, his years of teaching at the Bauhaus and his flight from Nazi Germany, he was American, having been born in New York City and emigrated to Europe in 1887. He longed to be a musician, supported himself by drawing caricatures and illustrations and did not start painting until he was 36. Naturally, Feininger did not begin with the style he is known for. But until lately, little was known of his early efforts. Most of them remained in East Germany.

It took decades to get them back. When the Nazis branded Feininger a "degenerate artist" in 1937, he left 54 paintings for safekeeping with a Bauhaus friend named Hermann Klumpp. After the war, and for the rest of Feininger's life, the perfidious Klumpp refused to give them back, on the casuistic ground that although Feininger had "intellectual ownership" of the paintings, he, Klumpp, was their "actual physical owner." Moreover, they were in East Germany, whose Communist government refused to surrender them to America. Their ownership had passed to Feininger's wife Julia on his death, and after she died in 1970 an executor of the Feininger estate, Art Lawyer Ralph F. Colin, went into high gear. It took him 14 more years of negotiation, a lawsuit against Klumpp and another against the government of East Germany to winkle out the missing paintings and get them to New York City. They were first exhibited at the Acquavella Galleries in Manhattan last fall. Now they can be seen (through Feb. 9) at the Phillips Collection in Washington.

To become a painter at all, Feininger had to disintoxicate himself of cartooning. It was not easy. Curiously enough, his first serious attempts, done as a student in Paris in 1907, were among the most painterly he would do for years: in Steeple Behind Trees, 1907, the caricaturist's facility of line is replaced by a splendid density of paint and assurance of marking. His way of cutting in rectangular dabs of color with a square-tipped brush seems to predict the shardlike planes of his mature work.

Back in Germany by 1908, Feininger became an illustrator again, with a half-ironic, half-nostalgic fixation on the 19th century. His early cityscapes, like Carnival in Arcueil, 1911, carry the picturesque to the verge of silliness. What have they to do with the "modern" life that modernism was supposed to be extolling, these scurrying figures in Biedermeier frock coats and baggy trousers, with stovepipe hats jammed at queer angles on their heads? Not much: Feininger's crowds never tell the depressing truth about urban friction that would glare from the streetscapes of some of his German contemporaries, like Max Beckmann or Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Around 1910 Feininger was still seeing the cities of Europe, especially those of Germany, as the stage set of a fairy tale. The trains (a favorite motif) are cute Puffing Billys with red-spoked wheels, 40 years out of date; the bicycles are velocipedes or penny-farthings; the houses are as obstinately medieval as those of Disney's yet uninvented Magic Kingdom. (Of course, those remnants of medieval architecture were a more common sight in Germany then, before the B-17.)

There was a fashion among German illustrators at the turn of the century for this kind of 1860s costume-partying (see how quaint our ancestors were!), and Feininger followed it closely. No wonder the mannerisms of his style--the capering windblown figures, the big feet and pin heads, the bright acidulous color and general air of good-humored flakiness--seem to have more to do with Beatles album covers and 1960s graphic artists like Alan Aldridge or Peter Max than with the future of modernist painting. Apparently he could handle only one change at a time; to hold the kind of color he now wanted to get into his work--fauve-expressionist stuff, patchy, high-keyed and bright, in which a sea could just as easily be rose madder or lemon yellow as blue or green--he needed the certainties of his former illustrator's style, with a line around every patch.

By 1911-12, cubism had entered his work via architecture: buildings, after all, were ready-made of planes and facets, to be pushed, lapped and dissolved as needed. The last comical gnomes were gone from Feininger's streets before the end of World War I. His years at the Bauhaus, which put him in daily touch with Walter Gropius, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky and produced his "high" crystalline style, are not well represented in this show. The reason is simply that Feininger brought those paintings to America with him: he could not bear to leave them behind. It now remains for some museum to put them together with this early work (and some of the caricatures) and give us the whole artist. --By Robert Hughes