Architectural Composition I

Architectural Composition I is a celebrated example of the schematic and graphic approach that quickly defined Lyonel Feininger’s post-war output during his golden years in New York. The work has been internationally exhibited – including in the 28^th Venice Biennale held in 1956 – and was also shown in Feininger’s seminal joint presentation at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944. As Schardt wrote in the catalogue to this exhibition, ‘Feininger’s form had reached its greatest concentration, his colour and technique are reduced to the utmost simplicity. His energies are devoted to the creation of a space in which the universal forces, absolute and free, manifest the reality of their ordered being’ (A. Schardt, ‘Lyonel Feininger’, in Lyonel Feininger Marsden Hartley, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1944, p. 17).

Feininger’s interest in architecture began from an early age. As a child strolling the streets of New York City, he was astonished by the first skyscrapers whose towering height dazzled the young boy. Such a vertiginous perspective proved electrifying and would go on to inform his oeuvre: As Feininger later reflected, ‘I don’t paint a picture for the purpose of esthetic [sic] achievement, and I never think of pictures in the traditional sense. From deep within arises and almost painful urge for the realization of inner experiences, an overwhelming longing, an unearthly nostalgia overcomes me at times, to bring them to light out of a long lost past’ (L. Feininger, 1927, reprinted in op. cit., p. 18). The thrilling, dizzying feeling of architecture would become, as such, one of Feininger’s most significant subjects.

Born in the United States, Feininger moved to Germany in 1887 to pursue, in theory, a career music. Instead, he chose to study art, first at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg and then at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Inspired by the Cubist compositions he saw on a trip to Paris, Feininger began to construct buildings out of planar forms. In Germany, his artistic career took off, and he participated in exhibitions alongside members of Der Blaue Reiter and taught at the Bauhaus. Despite his renown, in the wake of the National Socialists rise to power, Feininger was reclassified as a degenerate artist. So when the opportunity to teach a summer course at Mills College in Oakland, California, arose, he jumped at the chance; after the summer ended, he moved back home to New York.

As an early member of the growing community of artists in exile, Feininger was, at that juncture, relatively unknown in the United States, and it would take him a year or so to find his footing both personally and artistically in his native country. He would go on to influence the radical new art idioms that would eventually define the American avant-garde.

In 1940, the year the present painting was created, Feininger worked on three compositions showcasing the New York skyline, refining his representation of space through the fragmentation of form. If previously Feininger had reinterpreted a Cubist idiom, he now strove to see anew. In a letter to Alois Schardt of November that year, he wrote: ‘I am beginning to surprise myself in this ability to innovate…I have a few charcoal compositions for oil paintings that will come later. These will be important for my work in the winter. They are spatial depictions of the architecture in Manhattan, in which I want to try to achieve what others pass over, namely, working without ‘symbolism’, only with the structure and interpenetration, abstract dematerialization, the exclusion of anything that is episodic…’ (L. Feininger, letter to A. Schardt, 1940, partially reprinted in U. Luckhardt, Lyonel Feininger, Munich, 1989, p. 46).

Feininger initially found aesthetic resolution in his drawings, but Architectural Composition I represents the summation of his artistic experimentation. Feininger’s painting offers an astonishing view of the city that otherwise would be impossible to behold, in which the ‘fugitive play of the atmosphere is refracted in an enchanted space’ (W. Haftmann, ‘Painting’, in German art of the twentieth century, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1957, p. 108).

Architectural Composition I is a celebrated example of the schematic and graphic approach that quickly defined the artist’s output during his last years. The work has been internationally exhibited – including in the 28^th Venice Biennale held in 1956 – and was also shown in Feininger’s seminal joint presentation at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944. As Schardt wrote in the catalogue to this exhibition, ‘Feininger’s form had reached its greatest concentration, his colour and technique are reduced to he utmost simplicity. His energies are devoted to the creation of a space in which the universal forces, absolute and free, manifest the reality of their ordered being’ (A. Schardt, ‘Lyonel Feininger’, in op. cit, p. 17).