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28/6/2011

Lyonel Feininger - Xavier Cha

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World
Curated by Barbara Haskell with the assistance of Sasha Nicholas

Lyonel Feininger has long been recognized as a major figure of the Bauhaus, renowned for his romantic, crystalline depictions of architecture and the Baltic Sea. Yet the range and diversity of his achievement are less well known. Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World, the artist’s first retrospective in the United States in forty-five years, is the first ever to incorporate the full breadth of his art by integrating his well-known oils with his political caricatures and pioneering Chicago Sunday Tribune comic strips; his figurative German Expressionist compositions; his architectural photographs of Bauhaus and New York subjects; his miniature hand-carved, painted wooden figures and buildings, known as City at the Edge of the World; and his ethereal late paintings of New York City. Curated by Barbara Haskell with the assistance of Sasha Nicholas, the exhibition debuts at the Whitney Museum of American Art from June 30 to October 16, 2011, and subsequently travels to The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, January 16 –May 13, 2012.

Born and raised in New York City, Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956) moved at the age of sixteen to Germany to study music. Instead, he became a caricaturist and eventually a leading member of the German Expressionist groups Die Brücke and Die Blaue Reiter and, later, the Bauhaus. In the late 1930s, when the Nazi campaign against modern art necessitated his return to New York after an absence of fifty years, his marriage of abstraction and recognizable imagery made him a beloved artist in the United States. Having spent fifty years of his life in Germany, Feininger is most often considered a German artist. This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue illuminate his dual national loyalties and their reverberations in his art. As Haskell notes in her catalogue essay: “(Feininger’s) complex and contradictory allegiances—to American ingenuity and lack of pretension on the one hand, and to German respect for tradition and learning on the other—rendered him an outsider in both countries. Always yearning for one world while living in the other, he never stopped longing for the ‘lost happiness’ of his childhood.”

Before he began to paint in 1907, at the age of thirty-six, Feininger had built a career as one of Germany's most successful caricaturists. When he turned to painting, he fused the whimsical figuration of his comic strips and illustrations with the high-keyed color of German Expressionist painting. Just at the moment that Feininger's oils began to earn him widespread recognition, World War I broke out. He spent the war in Germany as an enemy alien, never having relinquished his American citizenship. In 1919, Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, appointed Feininger as the school's first professor and commissioned him to design the cover of the Bauhaus manifesto. Feininger's expressionist woodcut, depicting a tripartite cathedral surrounded by shooting stars, symbolized the school's idealistic unification of fine art, architecture, and crafts. Feininger remained at the Bauhaus until it was closed by the Nazis in 1933, revered as a teacher and head of the school's graphics workshop. The monumental compositions of architectural and seascape subjects that he produced at the Bauhaus gained him national renown, culminating in his receipt in 1931 of Germany's highest honor for an artist: a large-scale retrospective at Berlin's National Gallery.

When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, the situation became unbearable for Feininger and his wife, who was Jewish. They moved to America in 1937, just months before his work was featured in the Nazi's infamous Degenerate Art exhibition. Readjusting to the changed landscape of New York was difficult after such a long absence; not until 1939 did Feininger begin painting again. In America, as in Germany, he employed geometric forms to invest the modern world with a secular spirituality. Art, for him, was a "path to the intangibly Divine,” a way of expressing what he called the “glory there is in Creation." At the same time, Feininger continued in his last years to call upon the playful figurative vocabulary of his early illustrations and comics to evoke the harmony and innocence of childhood. Feininger's 1944 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which traveled for two years to major American cities, established him as a major artist in his native country during his final years.

Panel on Feininger and Comics
Lyonel Feininger is considered one of the pioneers of modern comic art. His short-lived Chicago Tribune comic strips, The Kin-der-Kids and Wee Willie Winkie’s World, “achieved a breathtaking formal grace unsurpassed in the history of the medium,” as Art Spiegelman noted. A panel discussion, “Comics Stars and Strips,” will take place on Wednesday, July 20, at 7 pm, in the Whitney’s lower gallery. Inspired by the exhibition Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World, the panel of master comic artists, including Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, and Gary Panter, will discuss the intersection of comics and fine art. Moderated by John Carlin. Further information will be available at www.whitney.org.

Concert to Include Feininger’s Music
Feininger began his career as a violinist. Even after he shifted to fine art, he continued to regard music as the language of his “innermost self.” Between 1921 and 1927, he created twelve fugues, primarily for organ, in the style of Johannes Sebastian Bach. Only a few of them were ever performed publically. The American Symphony Orchestra will premiere three of Feininger’s fugues, along with Bach orchestrations by composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Max Reger. The concert will explore the inspiration Bach exerted on German modernism in the first half of the twentieth-century.

“Bauhaus Bach”
American Symphony Orchestra
Friday, October 21, 2011, at 8pm
Carnegie Hall
The program:
Bach/Max Reger, Aria “O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß” BWV 622
Bach/Arnold Schoenberg, Chorale Prelude “Komm, Gott, Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist” BWV 631
Feininger/, Three Fugues, orchestrated by Richard Wilson
Schoenberg, Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31
Bach/Schoenberg, Prelude and Fugue, BWV 552, “St. Anne”
Bach/Wolfgang Gräser, Selections from The Art of the Fugue

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Xavier Cha, Body Drama
curated by Diana Kamin

Beginning June 30, the New York–based artist Xavier Cha, whose work merges performance, video, and installation, will present a new work she conceived for the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition, Body Drama, is curated by Whitney curatorial assistant Diana Kamin. It will be on view through September. Cha’s works challenge the traditional relationship between artist and audience. Frequently collaborating with performers from other disciplines, Cha invites clowns, opera singers, and actors to become protagonists in her work and stand-ins for the artist herself. With some direction from Cha, these collaborators develop their own acts within environments that Cha has found or constructed. Windows and walls, for instance, serve as screens or physical barriers that simultaneously highlight the sculptural nature of each performance space and echo the psychological divide between performer and audience. In her recent work, Cha has included cameras as props in performances to suggest alternative perspectives.

Cha conceived Body Drama, a work that oscillates between live performance and projected video, for the Whitney’s Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Lobby Gallery. Several times a day, an actor will be on hand to perform, wearing a specialty body-mounted camera trained on the actor’s face as he or she moves through the gallery. Cha’s directions to the actor are to project the internal experience of being in an unknowable place, and to express that alienation and fear without using words. Between performances, videos from earlier performances are projected onto the wall, revealing the actor’s face against a distorted image of the gallery space.

Entering the exhibition, viewers encounter either the live performance or the projected video. Neither provides a complete picture, and both withhold visual information: the camera’s point of view is inaccessible to the viewer during the live performance and the physical movement of the actor is impossible to recognize in the video. Cha has described Body Drama as operating within three different planes of space: the psychological space of the actor’s performance, the physical space of the gallery’s architecture, and the temporal space between the live performance and the video. Refusing to cohere, these shifting planes attune viewers to the impossibility of discerning the authentic experience amid the endless loop of live and recorded performance. Performances will occur every hour on the hour, starting at 12 pm on Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday, and at 3 pm on Friday. For a list of participating actors, please visit whitney.org/Exhibitions/XavierCha in the coming weeks.

About the Artist
Xavier Cha was born in Los Angeles, in 1980; she currently lives and works in New York. Cha received her B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002 and her M.F.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2004. Her performance-based work has been shown in solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis (Two-Way Mirror, 2010) and Taxter & Spengemann Gallery, New York (The Third I, 2009, Voicedoor, 2008, and Holiday Cruise!, 2006). Group exhibitions include The Absolutely Other, 2010, The Kitchen, New York; Convention, 2009, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; and In Practice, 2006, The Sculpture Center, Long Island City.

Image: Lyonel Feininger, In a Village Near Paris (Street in Paris, Pink Sky), 1909. Oil on canvas, 39 3⁄4 x 32 in. (101 x 81.3 cm)
University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City; gift of Owen and Leone Elliott 1968.15
© Lyonel Feininger Family, LLC./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Contact: Stephen Soba, Molly Gross
tel. (212) 570-3633
pressoffice@whitney.org

Opening 29 June 2011

The Whitney Museum
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street, New York City
Museum hours are: Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Friday from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday
General admission: $18. Full-time students and visitors ages 19–25 and 62 & over: $12.
Visitors 18 & under and Whitney members: FREE
Admission to the Kaufman Astoria Studios Film & Video Gallery only: $6.
Admission is pay-what-you-wish on Fridays, 6–9 p.m.

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