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Lyonel Feininger, Street in Paris (Straße in Paris), also titled by the artist High Houses in Paris (Hohe Häuser, Paris) and Houses in Paris (Häuser in Paris), 1918, Woodcut. Smart Museum of Art, the University of Chicago. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Davidson, 1974.50 © 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Past

Lyonel Feininger: Awareness, Recollection, and Nostalgia

December 15, 1992 – March 28, 1993

American-born early modernist artist Lyonel Feininger is remembered as a leading member of German Expressionism. His illustrations in the 1890s and the early 1900s for German and American newspapers and journals, including the Chicago Tribune, are well known, and the impact of this commercial art on contemporaneous independent paintings, drawings, watercolors, and prints is indisputable.

While he shifted into Cubism in the mid 1910s, his themes and imagery remained largely the same. It is on the aesthetic continuity of his work despite these important and drastic shifts, that this exhibition of over 50 works focuses. Feininger’s early works represent the fantasies of a distant though unspecified German past and correspond to immigrant recollections of a lost, mythologized homeland. His drawings, watercolors, and prints reflect the psychology of one who might be considered doubly expatriate, as he left the United States for the childhood home of his ancestors, but then refused to enter fully into the life of his adopted country.

Curator
Professor Reinhold Heller of the Department of Art, University of Chicago, aided by Tina Yarborough, graduate student assistant and Stephanie D’Alessandro, Smart Assistant Curator. The works are on loan from several private collections in addition to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Support

The exhibition was funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and from generous contributions from the Milwaukee collectors and lenders to this exhibition, Marvin and Janet Fishman.

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