Published by Hatje Cantz. Text by Laura Muir, Nathan J. Timpano.
Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) was 58 years old when he took up photography. He had been a professor at the Bauhaus for almost a decade, and had enjoyed widespread success as a comic artist and painter. Ever open to new pursuits, and inspired by the works of his photographer sons Lux and Andreas and the experimental photography of his Dessau neighbor László Moholy-Nagy, Feininger took up the camera in 1928 and began to explore a variety of avant-garde techniques. This painter of crystalline architectures and landscapes left a legacy of fascinating unsettling images of shop window mannequins and reflections, nocturnal photographs using double exposures and other works. This is the first publication devoted to this little-known body of work. Examining about 70 original prints, it also relates Feininger's photography to the rest of his extensive oeuvre.
The German-American artist, photographer, illustrator and teacher Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) was one of the modernist era's true world citizens, allied with the Berlin Secession, Die Brücke, the Blaue Reiter and the Bauhaus. The Busch-Reisinger Museum, home to the Lyonel Feininger Archive, recently received a bequest of more than 400 Feininger drawings and watercolors from the estate of curator and collector William S. Lieberman, most of which have never before been published. Lieberman appears to have made a point of acquiring Feininger's more intimate and personal works (as opposed to, say, the murals for which he is so well known), and such works constitute the bulk of this volume. Essayist Peter Nisbet provides entries on individual works, offers perspective on Feininger's reception in the United States in the decades after his return from Germany in 1937 and suggests directions for an overdue reassessment of his oeuvre.
This expanded and updated edition of an in-demand, out-of-print title includes over 80 letters written between artists Lyonel Feininger (1871-1956) and Mark Tobey (1890-1976), from the time of their first meeting in 1944 to Feininger's death in 1956. An essay by Peter Selz, entitled "Parallel Visions," offers an introduction to the artists' friendship, and a chronology further clarifies their intersecting lives. Two brief reciprocal catalogue essays--one by Feininger about Tobey, and one by Tobey about Feininger--conclude the volume. Several paintings discussed in the letters are reproduced as color plates, along with a selection of the letters themselves.
Lyonel Feininger: Drawings and Watercolors
Years of Friendship, 1944-1956: The Correspondence of Lyonel Feininger and Mark Tobey