THE HUMAN COMEDY

GATES OF LIGHT & THE HUMAN COMEDY
Lyonel Feininger began his career as a cartoonist and illustrator -- a very successful one and a very original one. He was so successful that in 1906, after working for a dozen years in Germany, he was offered a job as a cartoonist at the Chicago Tribune, the largest circulation newspaper in the Midwest. He worked there for a year, inventing what became the standard design for the comic strip: in the words of John Carlin, “an overall pattern. . . that allowed the page to be read both as a series of elements one after the other, like language, and as a group of juxtaposed images, like visual art.”(1) His originality did not end there: he went on to become one of the great abstract painters. Like Kandinsky, music was his model, but Kandinsky only knew music from the outside -- as a listener (inspired initially by Wagner, then by Schoenberg) -- while Feininger knew it from the inside. He was born into a musical family -- his father was a violinist and composer, his mother was a singer and pianist, and at the age of 16 he left New York, where he was born (1871), to study music and visual art in Germany, from where his parents emigrated.

He studied violin with his father, and by the age of 12 he was performing in public, but he also drew incessantly, most notably the steamboats and sailing ships on the Hudson and East Rivers, and the landscape around Sharon, Conn., where he spent time on a farm owned by a family friend. Steamboats and sailing ships appear again and again in his later work. So do the “Connecticut hills against the Western sky” -- with its setting sun. But now its “wide valleys and solitary farms, barns, and the great old trees, amongst which the village church is nestled,” have been transposed to rural villages of Germany, as Feininger himself remarked.

The later works are nostalgic, but more to the artistic point they are illustrational as well as abstract -- abstract illustrations, even more pointedly, populist abstractions, that is, abstractions that appealed to the same masses who read the comic strips as well as to the esthetic cognoscenti who despised them. Comic strips were too “vulgar” to be taken seriously as art, but Feininger’s abstract images were esthetically precious despite their illustrational character. But the taint of being a people’s art -- an art that had broad rather than specialist appeal -- hung like a cloud over Feininger’s abstractions, which is why they have never been fully respected by the “purists.” Greenberg ignores them, and Mark Rosenthal didn’t bother to show them in his Guggenheim exhibition of "Abstraction in the 20th Century: Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline," presumably because they weren’t risky, free, and formally disciplined enough -- that is, they weren’t totally, ruthlessly abstract.

They were always second best; however formally refined, their subject matter stood out like a sore thumb, as it were, poking one in the eye with its offensive self-evidence, and with that its commonplaceness. Its ordinariness was not masked sufficiently by extraordinary art, however extraordinary Feininger’s art was -- which was apparently not extraordinary enough, because its subject matter remained too obvious: thus the vicious circle in which his art was caught. However “modernized” into Cubo-Futurist obscurity, the Clouds above the Sea I, 1923, the sailboats in X 54, 1929, and the Church at Gelmeroda XII, 1936, remain all too recognizable, and, worst of all, accurately described. The works were “pictorial,” and as such seriously flawed from the prevailing abstract perspective. They were scenic pictures, however abstractly scripted. Purity for Feininger was an instrument of precision, not an end in itself, which perhaps explains the oddly engineered, not to say Bauhaus look of his abstract images. (He was associated with the design school until it closed, and designed the optimistic Cathedral, 1919, that appeared on the brochure advertising it. The dramatic image, seamlessly integrating elements of Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and Constructivism in a new artistic structure -- a consummate avant-garde architecture, yet, ironically, one which used traditional sacred architecture as a template, even Platonic ideal -- symbolized “the new structure of the future,” and with it the reconciliation of the warring avant-garde factions, their working in the name of a common artistic and social cause, that Gropius celebrated in the brochure’s manifesto.)

Feininger’s paintings may not have seemed up to abstract par when they were made -- he never had the pride of pioneering place that Kandinsky and Gropius had (in a 1926 group photograph of the Bauhaus Masters, Gropius and Kandinsky stand in the center, their right arms raised in a quasi-Napoleonic pose, while Feininger and the other masters stand in more relaxed, passive poses, their arms lowered, as though submitting to the authority of the leaders) -- but they have gained a new lease on importance now that purity has become passé, not to say peculiarly ridiculous. Hygienically sacrificing familiar content to unfamiliar form -- paring content away until there is only consciousness of form -- backfired into staleness and sterility. It led to short-lived esthetic success -- the so-called “new lyricism” that Braque spoke of -- but it became a failure of creative imagination, however initially creative.

Feininger realized this, perhaps more than any other abstractionist of his time. He never lost his imagination, that is, his imaginative response to external, consciously perceived reality -- unlike Kandinsky, who argued that abstraction existed to evoke internal reality, to make us conscious of unconscious content (suggesting that he was not equal to external reality, as his so-called “Impressions” of it confirm, and, as his “Improvisations” suggest, he had no sense of the logic of the unconscious, but rather regarded it as a sort of Pandora’s box of illogical feelings, exciting and surprising but finally incoherent and incomprehensible, and as such absurdly autonomous ends in themselves).