In Feininger’s work, music was not used as a mere gimmick.
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A tall loner playing a fiddle and a carnivalesque horde blowing trumpets are among the most memorable. Next to Feininger’s matchless characters - his gentlemen in top hats, stumpy workers, questionable damsels or fierce churchmen - the occasional musician appeared. Organized in distorted perspectives, stark color contrasts and contours, these paintings were at times crammed with figures. His early paintings and watercolors were extravagant combinations of lanky figures in dreamlike old-world places filled with humor and whimsical nostalgia. By that time, Feininger was part of the leading group of avant-garde artists in Germany whose work was declared “degenerate” by the authorities.ĭespite his success as an illustrator, for a long time Feininger had aspired to become a serious artist, namely a painter. (His Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World comic strips, created for the Chicago Sunday Tribune, are considered milestones of cartoon history.) Although Feininger was always considered “der Amerikaner,” he settled in Germany without ever taking trips home to the States until 1936, when he and his Jewish wife moved to New York in the face of rising Nazi oppression.
![estey organ william haskell estey organ william haskell](https://demo.dokumen.tips/img/380x512/reader023/reader/2020111521/575095c21a28abbf6bc492d5/r-2.jpg)
Sent on an ocean liner to Germany to continue his study of the violin at the Leipzig Konservatorium (where his father had studied), the sixteen-year-old Lyonel literally jumped ship in Hamburg - as much to gain firm ground as to liberate himself from a musical path that had been all too well laid out for him.įeininger instead immersed himself in his other talent, draftsmanship, and by the early 1900s had become a leading cartoonist, contributing to German periodicals as well as some American ones. Considering the fugues of an expressionist painterīorn in New York in 1871 to an international concertizing violinist and an accomplished pianist, Lyonel Feininger seemed destined - by his German-American parents - to an ambitious musical career.