“American-German painter. Born in New York, Feininger travelled to Germany in 1887 to study music. However, drawing lessons at the Kunstgewerbeschule, Hamburg, and the Berlin Akademie led him to become a cartoonist and until 1909 he contributed work to German and American magazines. In 1911 he exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, Paris, and became aware of Orphism, early Cubism, and Futurism, each of which played a part in the development of his personal style of angular lines and transparent intersecting planes. From 1912 he was associated with progressive German painters, although never a true expressionist. In 1919 Feininger was invited by Walter Gropius (1883–1969) to teach at the newly founded Bauhaus and designed the woodcut The Cathedral of Socialism (1919; New York, MoMa) for the prospectus. He taught until1933 when the Bauhaus was terminated by the Nazis. His own work was declared degenerate and in 1937, his career destroyed, he moved to America and success. He added skyscrapers to his repertoire of sailing ships and Gothic cathedrals, for instance Gelmeroda VIII (1920–1; New York, Whitney Mus.), and celebrated the Manhattan skyline in a series of paintings from 1940 to 1944."
(SOURCE: [Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e874?q=lyonel+feininger&search=quick&pos=2&_start=1#firsthit, Accessed Oct. 27, 2016])
