Busch-Reisinger's 'Lyonel Feininger' Proves that Art is in the Details

It's a subtle tribute to an artist not to show off his greatest works, as if to say that real achievement can do without the fanfare. This might seem the guiding principle in the Busch Reisinger's new Lyonel Feininger exhibit were it not for the museum's more purposed scholarly approach. It has long been Harvard's goal to fill a niche by holding obscure but high quality shows, often groundbreaking in their approach, and surprising in their content.

In this instance, the subject is Lyonel Feininger, a world famous and influential painter most closely associated with the Weimar Bauhaus--but you won't see any of his most important works from that period or even many of his paintings. Instead you will see cartoons, newspaper clippings and pamphlet covers dating from before, during and after his rise to prominence.

You also will see photographs that few outside the fine arts academia have ever heard about. They come from the Houghton's unparalleled collection of correspondence, negatives and vintage photographs--part of the largest and among the most important Feininger collections in the world. Only a small fraction of Harvard's total 5,400 sketches, prints and clippings appear in this small, one room show.

Harvard's enormous collection allows possible Assistant Curator Emilie Norris' historiographical approach. She has organized the pieces around a modest controversy, Feininger's nationality, which raged, momentarily, in the early 1930s when Feininger was living in Germany. Curators had a hard time classifying Feininger because though he moved to Germany when he was 16, he was born and raised in New York. Since he came to prominence as a German, he never really lost that identity. But when Museum of Modern Art curator Alfred Barr included Feininger in a 1929-30 exhibit on American artists, he ran into "outspoken hostility."

Those familiar with Feininger evidently were not so familiar with him to know he really was American. They protested his place next to Hopper, O'Keeffe, John Marin and others. Adding Feininger to an exhibit of German artists a short time later only threatened to make matters worse. Norris has tried to clarify, if not resolve, the misunderstanding by simply calling Feininger an American abroad and framing Feininger's productive years as a German phase.

The question of national identity is still complicated because Feininger's German sojourn lasted a half century and his work appears distinctly German. His most influential pieces used the color pallette of postwar German Expressionism and his rigid, distorted figures anticipated Franz Marc, Ernst Nolde--and even Italian Futurism in some respects.

By 1919, Feininger's progress and reputation had grown so much that he was invited to design the cover on the Bauhaus Proclamation, the famous design school's mission statement. Evident already in Feininger's work are the crystalline figures he later would manipulate into his most renowned paintings: renditions of German churches and town halls.

Most of these important paintings belong to private collections or major museums, so do not expect to find them here. But considering that Feininger's painting phase only lasted from 1906 to 1919, when paints became difficult to find, what you will see is actually more representative of his life's work.

His transition to woodcuts marks an important period in both Feininger's work and German post-war works in general The process of chiseling and cutting figures in wood lent itself to Feininger's Cubist-inspired "transformation and crystallization" methods. Fragmenting and recomposing his choppy images was perfectly suited to the carving knife.

Here crystallization means not so much synthesis and formation as a mode of representation in which objects are viewed as though through a crystal. His images, especially in "Bird Cloud" (1926), appear refracted. Rather than showing various perspectives at once as the Cubists attempted to do, Feininger merely wanted to accentuate and flatten light planes, exaggerating them like a caricaturist would and rendering each with a different solid block of color before reassembling the pieces.

Perhaps the most engaging and surprising works are Feininger's photographs, mostly from the 1930's. They show off the artist's supreme sense of composition and perspective in a way that makes even his doodles (some on display) worth another look. That holds for at least two of his colored chalk sketches. Certainly "Four Nuns at the Beach" took no more than two minutes to finish and Feininger never would have thought to exhibit such things himself, but framed and mounted these sketches arrest attention in gross disproportion to the scant markings that define them.

Joining Walter Gropius' Bauhaus movement initiated a more theoretical phase in Feininger's work and secured his place amongst the greatest artists of the 20th century, though many of his colleagues have over-shadowed him. In 1924 when Kandinsky formed Der Blaue Vier, a reference to his earlier Munich group Der Blaue Reiter, Feininger went with him along with Paul Klee and Alexei von Jawlensky (whose works are also currently on display at the Busch-Reisinger). Teaching and producing with the group brought Feininger from there to the new Dessau Bauhaus and to Berlin where Klee and Kandinsky, in particular, expounded their famous theories on color and composition.

For anyone who has never visited the Busch-Reisinger galleries--and needs extra incentives--the modern gallery space is a pleasant discovery. On permanent display and complementing the Feininger exhibit are selections from Harvard's substantial German Expressionism collection and capping off the theme, Bauhaus model suspension chairs furnish the gallery's reading alcove. But beware the guards dressed like college students; they're barrel-chested and agile like a Mike Tiorano, only with less tolerance for pens and packs.