Despite six years of undergraduate and post-
graduate study at the Dessau Bauhaus, Feininger
nevertheless describes himself as a ‘‘self-taught’’
photographer. Though his formal education in aes-
thetics no doubt influenced his photographic style,
it is also true that the experimental photography for
which the Bauhaus is now so well known was not
formally implemented into its curriculum until
- Though many Bauha ̈uslers dabbled with the
modernNeue Sehenor ‘‘New Vision’’ aesthetic in
the mid-twenties, photography was widely regarded
as a peripheral pursuit by instructors more de-
dicated to functionalist architecture and design.
Feininger himself noted that he did not study pho-
tographic literature or theory until well after his
emigration to America in 1936. It is perhaps pre-
cisely this lack of formal critical thinking about
photography that lent such a fresh, unmediated
character to Feininger’s photographs.
Counting Russian film and German photogra-
phers Umbo and Walter Peterhans among his in-
fluences, Feininger has been careful to note the
distinctions between their approaches and his own.
Peterhans, he observed, was a still-life photographer,
whereas Feininger preferred to capture movement
and human subjects. Feininger’s body of work is
characterized by two distinct styles—candid snap-
shots of Bauhaus student life and architecture
exploiting the ‘‘New Vision’’ preference for extreme
points of view; and an exploration of the spatial
relationships between humans and architecture, and
more carefully posed formal documents of Oskar
Schlemmer’s Bauhaus theater workshops and perfor-
mances. Photos like ‘‘Sport at the Bauhaus’’ (c. 1927)
employ a stylistic spontaneity of pose, angle, and
shutter speed that reiterates the creative spontaneity
for which the school was so well known. In this
photograph, two young Bauhaus athletes are sus-
pended in a mid-air, back-to-back collision above a
backdrop depicting the school’s architectural cam-
pus. Their central positioning in the composition
over the five-story ‘‘Prellerhaus’’ student studio
building coupled with the photographer’s worm’s-
eye view creates a clever distortion of scale that
earned the photo the alternative title ‘‘Jump over
the Bauhaus.’’ This kind of dynamic point of view
and playful humor are likewise evident in the mis-
chievous smirks and clowning poses adopted by
members of the Bauhaus jazz band, whose ranks
Feininger photographed with equal enthusiasm. It
is important to note, however, that Feininger’s sati-
rical wit extended beyond youthful musing to include
a more serious critique of the ideological conflicts at
the school. Both students and ‘‘masters’’ were divided
between the strict dialectical materialist approach of
architects like Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer
and what Feininger described as a more ‘‘intuitive’’
approach of the painter Paul Klee and theater master
Oskar Schlemmer. Feininger’s critique of Gropius’
approach included pictures like Das Flache Dach
(The Flat Roof), which called attention to the failure
of ‘‘functional’’ architecture by documenting the ten-
dency of the flat roofs to flood and leak.
Feininger’s more formal images of the masks,
costumes, stage sets, and choreography of the thea-
ter workshop are no less dramatic than his candid
snapshots, but their drama is conjured more by
careful spatial arrangement and lighting than by
extreme or oblique points of view. His 1928–1929
studies of masks, for example, are carefully com-
posed still lifes that emphasize the plasticity of the
subject through the photographer’s use of deep
shadows punctuated by well-placed highlights.
Taken together, Feininger’s body of work func-
tions as much like a thoughtfully constructed fa-
mily album as it does a documentary record of this
famous school’s legendary aesthetic ideologies.
Contrary to his own professed lack of interest in
professional photographic practice, in 1927 Feinin-
ger sent two portfolios of photographs to Alfred
Barr, then chief curator of fine arts at New York’s
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Barr, who had
visited La ́szlo ́Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus earlier
that year, loaned 16 of these photographs to the
Bauhaus Exhibition held at the Harvard Society of
Contemporary Art in 1931, and two were officially
purchased by MoMA that same year. In 1928,
Feininger published his first photographs as a free-
lance photographer for the Dephot photographic
agency, which placed his photographs in a broad
range of publications likeDie Woche, Die Dame,
Der Arbeiter Fotograf, and Das Illustriete Blatt
over the next few years. And in 1929, he had seven
photographs accepted into the internationally
influentialFilm und Fotoexhibition in Stuttgart.
Despite this early success, by the early 1930s Fei-
ninger turned his interests to painting, exhibiting
two works at Berlin’s 1930 Kunstblatt Ausstellung
under the name ‘‘Theodore Lux,’’ perhaps drop-
ping his last name in an attempt to avoid compar-
ison with his famous father. Just prior to the
ascension of Hitler’s National Socialist regime, Fei-
ninger traveled to Paris, Sweden, and Switzerland
before emigrating to New York City in 1936.
Branded as a ‘‘degenerate artist’’ by Hitler’s cul-
tural ministry due to his association with the Bau-
haus and his wife’s Jewish heritage, Lyonel
Feininger also emigrated to New York the follow-
ing year. Having left the bulk of his negatives and
most of his paintings behind, the youngest Feinin-FEININGER, T. LUX