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24 24 LY O N E L F E I N I N G E R 1 8 7 1 - 1 9 5 6 Architectural Composition I, 1940 Signed 'Feininger' lower right, inscribed on stretcher Architectural Composition I' Oil on canvas 24 x 36 in, 61 x 91.5 cm Provenance Estate of the artist, New York, Julia Feininger, New York The Estate of Julia Feininger, New York Marlborough Gallery, London Connaught Brown, London Private Collection, UK Exhibitions New York, Buchholz Gallery, Lyonel Feininger: Recent Paintings and Watercolours, 26 January – 13 February 1943, no.1 Pittsburgh, Carnegie Institute, Painting in the United States, 14 October – 12 December 1943, no.191 New York, Museum of Modern Art, Lyonel Feininger: Marsden Hartley Exhibition, October 1944 - January 1945, cat. p.47, illus. p.39, (touring exhibition) Bozeman, Bozeman State College, New Paintings by Lyonel Feininger, 1949, no.2189.89 (touring exhibition) Washington, D.C., Workshop Centre of the Arts, The City, 21 September – 12 October 1951 (MoMA touring exhibition) Munich, Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, Lyonel Feininger, 3 September – 10 October 1954, no.21 (touring exhibition) Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Lyonel Feininger, 10 December 1954 – 17 January 1955, no.21, illus. Venice, XXVIII Biennale, American Artists Paint the City, 16 June – 21 October 1956, p.42 New York, Willard Gallery, Lyonel Feininger: Architecture Paris - New York, 1 – 31 March 1961, no.3 London, Marlborough Fine Art, Selected European Masters of the 19th and 20 th Centuries, Summer 1973, pp.44-45, no.22 Cologne, Galerie Gmurzynska, Klassische Moderne / The Classical Moderns, May – July 1981, p.76, no.41 Literature Manny Farber, 'Feininger, Tack, and Burlin', Magazine of Art 36, March 1943, pp.107-109 and 278 Hans Hess, Lyonel Feininger, Stuttgart, 1959, no.400, illus. p.286 Achim Moeller, ed., Years of Friendship, 1944-1956: The Correspondence of Lyonel Feininger and Mark Tobey, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2006, p.41 Achim Moeller, Lyonel Feininger: The Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, no.417 Born in New York, Feininger first studied art in Hamburg and Berlin. He began his career as a political cartoonist but turned to painting on his arrival in Paris in 1907. Robert Delaunay introduced him to Cubism and Orphism, but it was the 1912 Futurist Exhibition in Berlin that had the most profound influence on his future direction. Soon after seeing this exhibition he adopted a Prismatic style, using faceted natural forms to convey an object's three-dimensionally. In 1913 he exhibited with Der Blaue Reiter in Munich and in 1919 he joined the staff of the Bauhaus School in Weimar alongside Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy, amongst others. Feininger returned to New York in 1937 and quickly became absorbed in the city, continually depicting its architecture and the skyline it formed. Architectural Composition I is an important example of Feininger's New York period. It displays Feininger's development of a delicate geometric style composed of interlocking translucent planes, suggestive of both light rays and architectural forms. By representing the metropolis as a dynamic world of rhythm and movement he highlights and accentuates the beauty of the city. Feininger loaned Architectural Composition I to MoMA for two exhibitions, one in 1944-5 and the next six years later in 1951-2. In 1956, the year he died, Feininger was chosen to be part of the American Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Entitled American Artists Paint the City, the exhibition included Georgia O'Keffe, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. Architectural Composition I was one of three Feininger paintings displayed. In the accompanying catalogue Katharine Kuh, curator of the Pavilion, described how Feininger 'condenses and symbolizes all the shining lights of America'. "New York is the most amazing city in its atmosphere, colour and contrasts, in the whole world." LY O N E L F E I N I N G E R