Lyonel Feininger

 

While doing research for grad school I stumbled upon a couple of books on Lyonel Feininger. The odd thing was that when I saw them on the self of the college library in the painting section I thought, I recognize that name, but as a turn-of-the-last century cartoonist, not as a painter. Whadda ya know, he was both. (Funny too that books on his painting tend to barely mention his cartooning, and visa versa.)

Feininger was an American who lived most of his life in Germany and did work for many of the humor magazines of the day. He also did two short-lived Sunday comics strips The Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World, for the Chicago Tribune. Then he became a painter and one of the first instructors of the Bauhaus.

In one of the books, I found this below photo of figurines he made of his comics characters.

 

Paintings

Here’s some paintings I included in my grad school application. They include some of my cartoon imagery. Can you identify them? Below is what I said to make myself sound smart.

“In painting I’ve been utilizing my own graphic language as a jumping off point. I may take an object I’ve drawn many times and use cropping, color, texture and other modifications to show this object in a different light not only to the viewer, but also to myself.”