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Lyonel Charles Feininger (1871-1956) was a German-American painter and printmaker, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist. He was born and grew up in New York City, traveling to Germany at 16 to study and perfect his art. He started his career as a cartoonist in 1894 and met with much success in this area. He was also a commercial caricaturist for 20 years for magazines and newspapers in the USA and Germany. At the age of 36, he started to work as a fine artist. He also produced a large body of photographic works between 1928 and the mid 1950s, but he kept these primarily within his circle of friends. He was also a pianist and composer. He is probably best-known today for his Bauhaus associations. He was Walter Gropius's first faculty appointment and was put in charge of the printmaking workshop. His famous cover for the Bauhaus 1919 manifesto took the form of an expressionist woodcut 'cathedral'. Feininger returned to his native US after his work was declared degenerate by the Nazis.
This woodcut dates from the same year as the Bauhaus cover. Entitled 'Wrack und Schiffe' in German, this translates as 'Wreck and Ships'. The foreground ship appears to have run aground right beside a pier, and a solitary figure beholds it. Two other ships fill the composition. Although today it would be regarded as a semi-abstract work, it was as advanced as anything in Germany at the time, drawing on both expressionism and, in the dynamic, almost diagrammatic lines, futurism.
This was the first work bought by Te Papa's predecessor, the National Art Gallery, with funds from the Sir John Ilott Charitable Trust in 1984, just over 10 years after Ilott's death. It is safe to say that he would never have contemplated acquiring such a modernistic work for his own collection, but its acquisition nonetheless honoured his beliefs in the significance of printmaking as an art form and medium.
See:
Wikipedia, 'Lyonel Feiniger', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyonel_Feininger
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art August 2018