Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, 1928–1939

Harvard Art Museums to show "Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, 1928–1939"

Posted: 26 Mar 2012 12:43 AM PDT

Cambridge, Massachusetts.- Harvard Art Museums are proud to present "Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, 1928–1939", on view at the Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum from March 30th through June 2nd. A selection of the artist’s drawings and watercolors from the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s permanent collection complements the exhibition. One of the most versatile talents of the modern art movement in Germany, the American-born Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956) is celebrated as a master of caricature, figurative painting, and a distinctive brand of cubism, but he also created a fascinating body of photographic work that is virtually unknown. 

Drawn primarily from the collections at Harvard University’s Houghton Library, the exhibition offers the first opportunity to consider his achievement within the medium. Around 60 of Feininger’s photographs, as well as related works on paper and two of his early cameras, are on display. The photographs are complemented by an installation of around 25 of the artist’s drawings and watercolors, plus a major painting from the collection of the BuschReisinger Museum.

The works on paper are all drawn from the recent bequest of William S. Lieberman to the Busch-Reisinger. The painting, "Gross Kromsdorf III (1921)", was a gift from Feininger’s wife, Julia, in 1964. The exhibition focuses on the rich and productive period between 1928 (when Feininger first took up the camera) and the late 1930s, when he was exploring an array of avant-garde photographic techniques and making his own prints. Despite his early skepticism about this “mechanical” medium, the painter was inspired by the enthusiasm of his sons Andreas and T. Lux as well as the innovative work of his fellow Bauhaus master and Dessau neighbor László MoholyNagy. In the fall of 1928 the 57-year-old Feininger began to conduct his own experiments, discovering in photography a new means of energizing and advancing his artistic program. Lyonel Feininger: Photographs, 1928–1939 was curated by Laura Muir, Assistant Curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Division of Modern and Contemporary Art, Harvard Art Museums. Muir also authored the accompanying catalogue. The exhibition and catalogue are based on new research on the collection of the artist’s negatives and slides in the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s Lyonel Feininger Archive, which has only recently been catalogued and digitized, making it fully accessible for the first time. Muir’s research also draws on Feininger’s extensive correspondence housed at Houghton Library and her interviews with the artist’s recently deceased son T. Lux. The majority of Feininger’s photographs, which he shared with only a few close friends and family, remained in his private collection until his death in 1956. In 1987 his son T. Lux donated them to Houghton Library.

The exhibition also includes key loans from other US and German lenders, including the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin. “When he took up the camera at the Bauhaus in 1928, Lyonel Feininger was at the height of his fame as a painter. While he remained committed to that practice, he saw photography as a new means of exploring his interests in reflections, transparency, and the effects of light and shadow,” said Muir. “Experimenting with night imagery, negative printing, multiple exposures, and radical enlarging and cropping, he created a strikingly modern yet surprisingly personal body of work that has remained virtually unknown.” Feininger’s first photographs were atmospheric night views of the Bauhaus Building and the nearby neighborhood, including Untitled (Night View of Trees and Streetlamp, Burgkühnauer Allee, Dessau) (1928) and Bauhaus (Mar. 26, 1929). In Halle, while working on a painting commission from the city, Feininger recorded architectural sites in works such as Halle Market with the Church of St. Mary and the Red Tower (1929–30), and experimented with multiple exposures in photographs such as Untitled (Street Scene, Double Exposure, Halle) (1929–30), a hallucinatory image that merges two views of pedestrians and moving vehicles. One of his Halle paintings, Bölbergasse (1931), makes an appearance in Untitled (Unfinished Painting in Studio, Halle) (1931), an image that explores the relationship between the canvas and the space in which it was created.  In the months after the Nazis closed the Bauhaus and prior to Feininger’s departure from Dessau in March 1933, he made a series of unsettling views of mannequins and reflections in shop windows such as Drunk with Beauty(1932). In 1937 the American-born Feininger permanently settled in New York City after a nearly 50-year absence, and photography served as an important means of reacquainting himself with the city. The off-kilter bird’s-eye view he made from his studio Untitled (Second Avenue El from Window of 235 East 22nd Street, New York) (1939) is a dizzying image of an American subject in the style of European avant-garde photography, and mirrors the artist’s own precarious and disorienting position between two worlds and the past and present.

The Harvard Art Museums, among the world’s leading art institutions, comprise three museums (Fogg, BuschReisinger, and Arthur M. Sackler) and four research centers (Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, the Center for the Technical Study of Modern Art, the Harvard Art Museums Archives, and the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis). The Harvard Art Museums are distinguished by the range and depth of their collections, their groundbreaking exhibitions, and the original research of their staff. The collections include approximately 250,000 objects in all media, ranging in date from antiquity to the present and originating in Europe, North America, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. Integral to Harvard University and the wider community, the art museums and research centers serve as resources for students, scholars, and other visitors. For more than a century they have been the nation’s premier training ground for museum professionals and are renowned for their seminal role in developing the discipline of art history in this country. In June 2008 the building at 32 Quincy Street, formerly the home of the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger museums, closed for a major renovation. During this renovation, the Sackler Museum at 485 Broadway remains open and has been reinstalled with some of the finest works representing the collections of all three museums. When complete, the renovated historic building on Quincy Street will unite the three museums in a single state-of-the-art facility designed by architect Renzo Piano. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.harvardartmuseums.org