Lyonel Feininger: 1871-1956 A Life and Art beyond the Bauhaus
- Thursday 14 January 2027
- Online Zoom Event, link details will be emailed to attendees on the morning of the event
- Lecturer: Thomas Abbott
Lyonel Feininger’s spectacular frontispiece for Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus Manifest mesmerises with crystalline lines, prismatic light, and architectural form while expressing the Bauhaus goals of creating a new way of art and life post world war one.
However, Feininger’s career commenced as a cartoonist after completing his studies 1896 in Hamburg and Berlin. In fact, Feininger, in 1906 contributed to the Chicago Sunday Tribune the rather outlandish cartoon strips “Kin-Der-Kids” and “Wee Willie Winkie’s World”. These strips belie a studied consideration of Japonisme and the Japanese Print.
Fellow artists such as Matisse, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Marc further inform Feininger in terms of colour, shape, meaning. And yet, Feininger with his objective abstraction, his prismatic lighting, and his nearly messianic presence at the Bauhaus impact art to this day.
Born the son of two German musician emigres in New York City, Feininger resided in Germany as of 1887. However, in 1937 in response to the Third Reich, Feininger departs Germany. He returned to the city of his birth, New York where he dies in 1956.
Let us discuss Lyonel Feininger and his art before, during, and beyond the Bauhaus.
Lecturer
Thomas Abbott is an independent art and architectural historian, who has lived in Berlin for over thirty years. Born in the United States, he graduated in Psychology and Art History from Minnesota and continued his studies at the Louvre School of Art History in Paris. He has regularly devised and led cultural tours to Germany, France, Italy, and Poland for several of the leading specialist travel companies and took several tours for the London Art History Society to Berlin, Vienna, Munich & the Bauhaus. His expertise in art and architectural history ranges from the medieval to the current and encompasses garden history and the musical heritage of Germany.