with an introduction by Richard A. Born
This publication focuses on Lyonel Feininger’s fabrication of a private world founded in a highly personal reconstruction of memory and experience.
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.
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.