These are difficult times, perhaps more so right now than at any point in recent memory. So in my dejection and unrest I felt almost guilty for turning to a pleasant diversion like art. But then, that’s one of the reasons art is there, isn’t it?
I’d always been vaguely aware of Lyonel Feininger because his name would sometimes pop up at museums underneath paintings that caught my eye. But I’d only seen a few. I’m no art aficionado, and I don’t have a long list of favorite painters. Van Eyck, Vermeer, Renoir, Rousseau, Klee.
I recently went to find out a little more about Feininger’s work, just to look at some more of it. And I’m telling you, I was completely taken not only with his paintings, but with his earlier comic-strip work that I had no idea existed. You can add Feininger to my short list now.
What strikes me most clearly about Feininger’s art is the way he treasures and even glorifies simple things that we might normally view as mundane. Houses. Trees. Clouds. The Sun. Things that any kid might draw. But kids draw those things because they haven’t yet learned to take them for granted, and Feininger takes nothing for granted.
I can relate to this because some of the times I am happiest is when I’m simply walking at night, feeling the breeze, maybe smelling honeysuckle in the air, and looking up at the stars. I don’t ever take it for granted either.
One Feininger painting that pulled me in right away was this one:
This isn’t a view of some houses. It’s a view of your memory of these houses. Maybe you walked down this hill and passed them a thousand times. Sometimes it was gloomy, and sometimes it was bright. This scene is both of those at once. What looks like the sea and the horizon behind the house in the center is dark, like it would be on a stormy day. Yet a dazzling ray of sunlight strikes the house from the left at the same time.
I have a lot of views like this in my own memory. The bedsheets on the clothesline over in Mrs. McHugh’s yard when I was 2. The weird Spanish-colonial couch in the living room where I grew up. The view out the window on the top floor of the house on Monroe Street, the first place I ever lived in by myself. None of these things exists anymore, and none seemed very important. But they do, and they are, in my mind, in superimposed fragments like Gaberndorf.
Feininger described his work in a letter to his wife, and I’m glad he said this, because I think it means I grasped what he was trying to do before he had to tell me in words:
I don’t paint a picture for the purpose of creating an aesthetic achievement, and I never think of pictures in the traditional sense. From deep within me arises an almost painful urge for 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.
It’s less about the objects themselves and much more about the inner experience. But you still need the objects to set up those experiences, because we relate to the real world mostly through objects. Some of Feininger’s contemporaries went completely abstract, but I think this is why Feininger didn’t.
This is true again in “Sailing Boats”, though we get a different kind of inner experience here. The details of exactly what the boats look like is hardly important, because that isn’t what makes you feel something.
That granular bright blue immediately makes me feel the coolness and briskness of the wind. It’s exhilarating but actually noticeably scary at the same time. The boats reach all the way up to the top of the canvas and even cast shadows up there because they’re big, menacing creatures, and yet the brisk wind is able to bend them like that with its force. Light radiates from the center, but from somewhere far away, back where another giant boat is barely visible. So there’s this massive scale that makes me feel like I’m nowhere in particular within a vast area, and everything’s being whipped about.
Everybody paints boats, and generally what you get is … boats. But what I get out of “Sailing Boats” is a feeling that makes me hold my breath.
Before Feininger started painting, he had actually been a cartoonist, best known for his work in the Sunday Chicago Tribune in 1906 (The Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World). His gig lasted only for that year, because his full-page cartoons were well ahead of their time. They’d soon be replaced with more-conventional fare.
In Wee Willie Winkie’s World, Feininger’s spiritual value for the ordinary is maybe the most clear. The only significant human character is the title character, who simply roams the land among everyday things. It’s almost Seinfeldian in that it’s a story “about nothing”.
But Wee Willie Winkie is what Feininger is asking us to be. Sure, we can walk around and blithely see trees and clouds at face value, or not bother to see anything at all. Or we can choose to see this:
I’d be spooked by those towering cloud apparitions if I were the poplars, too! You can feel a bit of the monumental force here that presages “Sailing Boats”.
In the evening, we might give a passing glance at the Sun, or maybe even forget the Sun altogether. But if you’re Wee Willie Winkie, you thank the Sun for giving you life by keeping him company as he pulls great billowing clouds over himself and nods off to sleep. You’re so glad he’s comfortable. And you respect him by taking your hat off.
Feininger turns the ordinary into something quite poignant.
In the painting below, he salutes a 500-year-old church by giving it vitality and grandeur, even in what appears to be a nighttime view. Don’t just see a dark old building, he says, but see in it the aspirations of those who built it and those who entered it over all these years. See that vibrant process. It’s a vehicle pointed to something greater, to a point of light in the sky above its steeple, and it is very much alive.
I’m uncannily reminded of another vehicle pointed to something greater, one that would appear thirty-some years later:
But even in the grandeur of “Gelmeroda” I also see an echo of Feininger’s beginnings. At the base of the steeple there’s a house-shaped structure that appears to have one eye open and a bit of a face, even seeming a little cartoonish when you focus in on it.
That old church is alive, all right.
I’m leaving you with a couple more of Feininger’s paintings that I like, and a thought about art in general: Whatever these paintings make you feel, whatever they remind you of, whatever they evoke in you, and whatever you think of them, you are correct.