Lyonel Feininger: An American in Paris

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Dear Friends,

I’m pleased to invite you to visit our latest viewing room, Lyonel Feininger: An American in Paris, featuring 36 nature studies, drawings, watercolors, and woodcuts of sights in and around this great European city by Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956).

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Feininger first visited Paris in November 1892. Together with his friend, Frederick (Fritz) Strothmann, he rented a small room at 9 Rue Campagne Première. At night he took drawing courses at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Delécluse. In a “five-minute life drawing” class he learned to capture a subject quickly and precisely. During the day he visited the Musée de Cluny and made sketches in the less visited areas of the city.

The small, fleeting details of Paris particularly entranced Feininger. As he wrote to a friend: “My stay has been wonderfully beneficial to me—wonderfully, the only time I have ever been seriously at work, and I have been happy in my work.” Back in Berlin in 1893, he continued sketching and “making notes of all sorts of passers-by…from our windows. And out of doors I do the same; also in restaurants, etc. It is of the greatest value to me to…seize instantly the character of an object whether animate or otherwise.”

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In July 1906, Feininger returned to Paris with his new love Julia Berg (née Lilienfeld). They would call the city home for the next two years. Feininger again studied at the Académie Colarossi, expanding his rich body of urban drawings. He also revisited the Musée de Cluny and ventured out of town to Meudon and Arcueil to sketch the viaducts. A regular at Café du Dôme, the haunt of German artists and students of Matisse, he later recalled: “I began to observe works of art and the paintings of the artists with whom I was acquainted in Paris (the Dôme group especially) began to acquire new meaning for me.” Inspired by his peers, he made his first oil painting in 1907.

Feininger found himself in Paris again in May 1911, as six of his paintings were shown at the Salon des Indépendants alongside work by the leading avant-garde artists of the day, including Matisse, Delaunay, and de Chirico. At the Salon he discovered Cubism, which would influence him profoundly. During this short stay, he managed to return to his favorite suburbs to sketch the church in Bourg-la-Reine and the viaducts in Meudon and Arcueil.

In 1913, Feininger wrote to fellow artist Alfred Kubin of his time in Paris: “At long last [I] got to know the world of art! I could think, feel and work for myself.”

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