Even during times of joy and success, a shadow followed Feininger. In 1937, he escaped from the National Socialist regime in Germany and fled to the United States. Suddenly, the shadow had a new form and name: exile.
The US-American Feininger was an extremely successful artist in Germany. When the National Socialists seized power, he and many modern artists were categorized as “degenerate” artists. His wife Julia was persecuted for being Jewish. Without the ability to work and fearing for their lives, the Feiningers went into exile in 1937 and fled to New York City.
“People with yearnings understand me.”
LYONEL
FEININGER–1917
What should have been a joyous homecoming was anything but that. The artist was at the height of his career when the National Socialists defamed him. After spending fifty years working and building a professional network in Europe, the New York to which he returned was an unrecognizable, inhospitable place. Julia and Lyonel Feininger also struggled financially at the beginning of their exile. He visually manifested his longing for Germany in his work by returning to past motifs, such as the church of Gelmeroda. The adjustment was strenuous, but he eventually found inspiration in the Manhattan skyline, which became a new motif for him. In 1944, he reclaimed his unfairly interrupted success when The Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his works.
_ Julia Feininger
Julia Feininger was the one true constant in Lyonel’s life. In 1905, he met the artist Julia Berg (neé Lilienfeld) in Berlin. They were both married to other people at the time. They divorced their respective partners and Julia gave birth to their first son, Andreas, shortly thereafter. The couple married in 1908 and had two more sons—Laurence in 1909 and T. Lux in 1910. Julia was a talented artist, and it was her talent that originally attracted Lyonel, but she gave up her career in order to take care of the children and support her husband. While this decision can be seen critically today, she and Lyonel had a balanced partnership. Her support gave Feininger incalculable moral and professional support, which is evident in their extensive letter correspondence. The love and respect he had for Julia strongly influenced the course of his career. For example, she was the person who motivated him to experiment with painting.
Tall trees flank the sides of the chasm created by the road through the forest. The sky is clear, but it is shaped like a jagged shard. The minuscule man in the foreground is engulfed by the darkness around him. “The Road in the Pine Forest” evokes a sense of loneliness. The First World War had just come to an end when Feininger made this woodcut. During the war, he was forced to register with the police as a “national of an enemy country” (Ger.: Angehöriger eines Feindstaates) on a weekly basis. “Road in the Pine Forest” is possibly a reflection of Feininger’s alienation and feeling of isolation during this time.
“Manhattan I” is part of the artist’s painting series of dystopic visions of New York. The buildings on both sides of the street canyon appear rickety and dilapidated. The yellow is not sunny, but rather noxious. The browns are ominous instead of warm and earthy. There is a glimpse of a clear, blue sky, it is almost entirely obscured by a large, columnar cloud. Perhaps it is the exhaust fumes and smog being belched out by the ceaseless New York traffic that is hiding the sky.
Exile in New York posed personal as well as artistic challenges for Feininger. He found the city in its entirety to be too overwhelming to capture in paint, so he turned to modern technology to approach his subject— the color slide. While in Europe, he frequently used the motif of street canyons in paintings, photographs, and woodcuts. In New York, Feininger revisited this motif, but with residential and commercial skyscrapers. From the upturned perspective, the buildings seem massive and sublime. The focus of his slide photography is not to document details, but rather to demonstrate the overall effect of structures and forms.
Tall trees flank the sides of the chasm created by the road through the forest. The sky is clear, but it is shaped like a jagged shard. The minuscule man in the foreground is engulfed by the darkness around him. “The Road in the Pine Forest” evokes a sense of loneliness. The First World War had just come to an end when Feininger made this woodcut. During the war, he was forced to register with the police as a “national of an enemy country” (Ger.: Angehöriger eines Feindstaates) on a weekly basis. “Road in the Pine Forest” is possibly a reflection of Feininger’s alienation and feeling of isolation during this time.
“Manhattan I” is part of the artist’s painting series of dystopic visions of New York. The buildings on both sides of the street canyon appear rickety and dilapidated. The yellow is not sunny, but rather noxious. The browns are ominous instead of warm and earthy. There is a glimpse of a clear, blue sky, it is almost entirely obscured by a large, columnar cloud. Perhaps it is the exhaust fumes and smog being belched out by the ceaseless New York traffic that is hiding the sky.
Exile in New York posed personal as well as artistic challenges for Feininger. He found the city in its entirety to be too overwhelming to capture in paint, so he turned to modern technology to approach his subject— the color slide. While in Europe, he frequently used the motif of street canyons in paintings, photographs, and woodcuts. In New York, Feininger revisited this motif, but with residential and commercial skyscrapers. From the upturned perspective, the buildings seem massive and sublime. The focus of his slide photography is not to document details, but rather to demonstrate the overall effect of structures and forms.
“The Vanishing Hour”
– The title alone speaks volumes about Feininger’s state of mind.
Between day and night, there is twilight—a liminal space.
In this painting, the sky looks as if it is ablaze with red flames, which stands in stark contrast to the cool, blueish-gray tones of the amorphous building. The black windows of the structure appear empty and unoccupied. It appears as if Feininger was processing his memories of Europe in this painting. He titled many architectural and landscape works of his New York era with the names of the locations. For other works, such as “The Vanishing Hour”, he chose more associative rather than geographic titles. Is this New York? Is this Berlin? Is this Dessau? This is nowhere. This is exile.
_ “DEGENERATE” ART
In 1933, the National Socialists began their campaign against so-called “degenerate” art (Ger.: “entartete” Kunst). The definition of “degenerate art” was purposefully vague, but the term was assigned to all media that did not correspond to the ideologies and aesthetics of National Socialism. Modern art was regarded as a threat to the regime. Modern artists, especially those of Jewish descent, were persecuted, and their works were removed from museums. Works by some of the most successful artists of the early twentieth century were auctioned off and sold. Over 400 of Feininger’s works were seized from collections and museums throughout Germany. The defamatory “Degenerate Art” exhibition was held in the Institute of Archaeology in the Hofgarten in Munich in 1937. In this photograph, one can see Feininger’s oil painting “Teltow,” which was intentionally mislabeled as “Hopfgarten.” Many of Feininger’s paintings were presented in the exhibition, including “Gelmeroda III.”