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Lyonel Feininger (Léonell Charles Feininger) is born in New York City on July 17th. He is the first child of the violinist Karl Feininger from Durlach in Baden (South West Germany) and the American singer Elizabeth Cecilia Feininger, born Lutz, who is also of German descent. His childhood is spent in New York City. However, when his parents go on concert tours, Lyonel and his younger sisters Helen and Elsa often stay with friends of the family in Connecticut, or with their grandparents in South Carolina. At age nine Lyonel receives violin lessons from his father but is more interested in drawing and building model ships. The child is fascinated by steamboats and locomotives.
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He shows 13 drawings at the school’s exhibition. The same year he moves to Berlin where he is accepted at the Königliche Akademie. He attends the classes of the painter Ernst Hancke and starts to work on caricatures.
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He works as a caricaturist for the weekly magazine Humoristische Blätter.
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His father sends him to Liège to the Jesuit-run College St. Servais. Feininger is fascinated by the old architecture and atmosphere of Liège and Brussels.
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In the summer he returns to Berlin where he studies at the art school of Karl Schlabitz who instructs him in plein air drawing. After the closing of the school, he returns to the Königliche Akademie.
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In November, Feininger moves to Paris where he spends the next six months. He visits the art school of the Italian sculptor Filippo Colarossi.
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After his return to Berlin, in April, he continues to work as a caricaturist for various German and American journals, including Harper’s Round Table, Harper’s Young People, Humoristische Blätter, Lustige Blätter, Das Narrenschiff, BerlinerTageblatt and Ulk. During his time in Germany he spends his summers on the Baltic shore.
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Feininger marries Clara Fürst, daughter of the painter Gustav Fürst. She is the mother of his daughters Lore (1901) and Marianne (1902). The artist is represented with drawings at the exhibitions of the annual Berlin Secession in the years 1901 through 1903.
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The Great Berlin Art Exhibition (Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung) includes 13 of his caricatures.
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He meets Julia Berg, born Lilienfeld. Both separate from their respective partners. While in Berlin, Feininger is commissioned by the Chicago Sunday Tribune to do two series of comic strips: The Kin-der-Kids and Wee-Willie Winkie’s World. He often visits Julia who studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Weimar. He sketches buildings in Weimar, Tiefurt and Gelmeroda, which later is to become one of his Leitmotives.
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Feininger travels to Paris with Julia, where he again takes classes at Colarossi’s studio and does many sketches of Parisian scenes. He frequents the Café du Dome, a hangout for German artist and students of Henri Matisse. He submits drawings for the French journal Le Témoin. Their first son, Andreas, is born in December.
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His contract with the Chicago Sunday Tribune is cancelled because he is not willing to settle in America. Nature sketches from Freiburg in the Black Forest, and mostly from Weimar, and villages in Thuringia and on the Baltic Sea occupy his art during the following years. Feininger executes his first painting, a still life, on April 7th 1907. Landscapes and Parisian cityscapes follow. At the same time he continues with his caricatures for newspapers and magazines. He sees paintings by Cézanne and Van Gogh at Bernheim Jeune.
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He sees his first painting by William Turner, whose prints he had admired as a little boy. He creates his first Mummenschanz painting. The same year he marries Julia in London and they move to Berlin-Zehlendorf, where they stay until 1919.
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Feininger becomes a member of the Berlin Secession and shows drawings at their exhibition. Laurence Feininger is born April.
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T. Lux Feininger is born in June
Feininger is represented by a painting for the first time. His artistic development is inspired by trips to Paris.
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He exhibits six paintings in the Salon des Indépendents where he gets to know Robert Delaunay. French Cubism leaves a deep impression on him.
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Feininger is in contact with the German avant-garde and gets to know the expressionist group Die Brücke. His friendship with Alfred Kubin begins. He works on his first architectural compositions.
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Feininger finds a studio in Weimar. By foot and by bike he explores villages surrounding Weimar, including Gelmeroda, Tröbsdorf, Mellingen and Niedergrunstedt. Sketches from these places will be his most important sources for future paintings. For the first time, he depicts the church of Gelmeroda in an oil painting. At the same time, he designs wooden trains for a toy factory in Munich. However, the outbreak of World War I brings an end to this project.
Invited by Franz Marc, Feininger exhibits his work at the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon. He comes in contact with Herwarth Walden’s Berlin gallery Der Sturm. Also, Feininger meets with Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who paints a portrait of him in 1915.
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He gets to know the American painter Marsden Hartley in Berlin.
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He exhibits with Conrad Felixmüller at the gallery Der Sturm.
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The Berlin gallery Der Sturm organizes Feininger’s first one-man-show. As an American, Feininger experiences great difficulties in Germany during the end of the war. The Feininger family moves to Braunlage in the Harz mountain range. Here Feininger develops his passion for woodcuts. (Due to the war, paint is becoming more costly whereas wood is less expensive and, therefore, more available to him).
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He creates more than 100 woodcuts and also carves little figures for his children. After the war Feininger becomes a member of the Novembergruppe, a group founded by César Klein and Max Pechstein in Berlin.
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Feininger becomes a member of the Dresden secessionist Gruppe 1919. He goes to teach in Weimar at the Bauhaus - founded by Walter Gropius. There, in the printing studio, he becomes “Meister der Formlehre“ and creates the title page for the Bauhaus Manifesto. For the first publication of the Bauhaus, in 1921, he creates a portfolio of twelve woodcuts. The same year he composes a fugue, and by 1928 will have composed another twelve.
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Feininger has his first show in a museum -the Anger-Museum in Erfurt – which later supplies him with a studio in 1924.
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The Detroit Institute of the Arts buys Raddampfer II. His notoriety in America continues to grow thanks to his inclusion in the group The Blue Four along with Paul Klee, Alexej von Jawlensky and Wassily Kandinsky. Feininger spends his summers in Thuringia and sketches villages including Vollersroda, Umpferstedt and Klein-Kromsdorf. In the north of Germany, he visits Lüneburg, Heiligenhafen, Lübeck and Neubrandenburg.
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Feininger spends his vacation with Gropius and Kandinsky in Timmendorf.
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He first visits Deep on the Baltic Sea, where he returns the next twelve summers, exploring its surrounding with Treptow, Kolberg, Cammin and Greifenberg.
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Galka Scheyer organizes exhibitions for group The Blue Four, the first one occurring in New York in 1925. The Bauhaus in Weimar is closed.
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The Bauhaus moves to Dessau and the Feiningers follow.
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Alfred Barr Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, visits Feininger. Exhibitions in Germany and the USA claim Feininger’s nationality:
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Thirteen of his works are part of the show New German Art from Berlin private collections.
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Feininger is represented with seven works in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s show, „19 Living American Artists“. He is commissioned to paint a cityscape for the city of Halle. He moves to a studio at the Moritzburg, where he will produce eleven paintings within the next two years.
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The series of Halle-paintings is purchased by the museum of Halle. The Folkwang-Museum in Essen organizes a show in honor of his 60th birthday. The show travels to the Berlin National Gallery. It contains 72 paintings as well as 65 watercolors and drawings. Feininger spends the summer in Paris and Brittany.
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The Bauhaus in Dessau is closed by the Nazis. The Feiningers spend the summer months in Deep and then stay with friends in Berlin.
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They rent an apartment in Berlin-Siemensstadt.
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In a letter from Karl Schmidt-Rottluff of March 24, Feininger learned that his work would be judged that day as “Degenerated Art” by the Nazi regime. Last summer in Deep.
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He and his wife sail to New York and from there head to San Diego. He teaches a summer class at Mills College. There, Neumeyer organizes Feininger’s first one-man-show in America, which later travels to San Francisco. Another one-man-show takes place at East-River-Gallery in New York.
Together with his wife, Feininger travels through California and New England, visiting towns throughout Connecticut from his childhood. In Los Angeles they stay with Galka Scheyer. After their return via Hamburg and Stockholm, they return to Berlin at the end of the year.
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The situation in Germany becomes unbearable and of personal peril as Julia Feininger is of Jewish descent. A second invitation to teach at Mills College expedites Feininger’s decision to leave Germany after 50 years and to immigrate to America. He and his wife leave Germany and arrive in New York in June.
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After another summer at Mills College, Feininger returns to New York, where he stays at the Earle Hotel on Washington Square. More than 400 works of his are confiscated from German museums, 19 are shown at the traveling exhibition “Degenerate Art”.
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Feininger and his wife move to an apartment on 235 East 22nd Street, where he lives the remainder of his life. A commission to paint murals for the 1939 World Fair, in the Marine Transportation Building and the Masterpieces of Art Building helps to improve his financial situation. The summer months are spent in Falls Village, Connecticut. The first oil paintings after his arrival in New York are memories of German cities and the Baltic Sea.
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Skyscrapers become a new motif. Various exhibitions and prizes help to give him more exposure and fame in America.
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His collaboration with Curt Valentin Gallery starts. Development of the “graphic style” in painting.
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Acquisition prize for Gelmeroda XIII at the Artists for Victory Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, New York.
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Awarded Worcester Museum of Art prize.
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Mark Tobey’s friendship with Lyonel and Julia Feininger is first initiated in a series of letters. Watercolors become more and more important in Feininger’s oeuvre. Large retrospective exhibition with Marsden Hartley at The Museum of Modern Art , New York.
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Feininger teaches an interdisciplinary course at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he again meets Gropius.
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From 1946 onwards he spends his summers and part of the fall in Long Island, Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and in New Haven, Connecticut - where he stays in the house of Josef Albers.
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Feininger is elected president of the Federation of American Painters and Sculptors.
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He wins the prize of the International Exhibition of the Carnegie Institute. The same year he has an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Boston together with Jacques Villon.
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Feininger celebrates his 80th birthday in Gropius’ house in South Lincoln, Massachusetts.
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Mark Tobey visited Feininger
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Elected member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
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On January 13th Feininger passes away in his New York apartment.
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*** Biographical information provided by Achim Moeller
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