Lyonel Feininger

"Free man, you shall always love the sea," wrote Baudelaire. And it was the sea which animated the hand of Lyonel Feininger so long and so well; not the indomitable, raging waters of Baudelaire as much as the deep, impenetrable immensity of Melville's ocean world. More significantly, it was always Feininger's own sea, personal, highly lyrical, and richly controlled.

At the Busch-Reisinger Museum of Germanic Culture Feininger is a German painter. At the Whitney Museum of American Art he is an American painter. The ambiguity, which is more than geographical, does him credit. It bespeaks the potencies of the individual.

In any number of those heterogeneous spectacles known as "the Whitney Annual" exhibition, Feininger would be represented by one of a small minority of delighting, consoling canvases. There would be present, inevitably, the proponents of the mode, the counter-mode, the eclat-du-jour, whatever it might be. There would be a mass of realists, as they are called, "magic" or otherwise, and a crowd of abstractionists, enchanted or unenchanted in like fashion. There would be the hawkers of social reform, the psychological brooders, those of the dark palettes, and so forth. In short, there would be a pot-pourri of most everything. Feininger invariably survived the tempest as one of the few who indeed justified it. Those interested parties among us who eagerly engage the democratic process in support of the muse usually wind up attempting to lift a few aristocrats from the debris. Lyonel Feininger was always one of the aristocrats.

The selection of oils and watercolors at Busch-Reisinger this month looks especially good. Feininger's ocean canvases contain all the architecture of his cathedral paintings. Their crispness remains taut and concise without suffering that mechanical rigor mortis which lurked in such abundance in the ranks of the Bauhaus. If this is German art, it is German in the sense that it pursues the kind of gentle lyricism which illuminates the music of Haydn, and in that it follows the path of classical rectitude which soars so in Bach. Happily, these works are devoid of the more histrionic and sentimental aspects of Teutonic picture making which plagued so many of Feininger's contemporaries. Feininger's concern is to sing rather than to cry out. The effect, in a painter, is becoming.

During a Feininger exhibition at the Curt Valentine Gallery some years ago, a painter remarked that there was really no canvas in the show he would like to take home despite his superlative opinion of the exhibit. He went on to say that, nevertheless, this was the best show on Fifty-Seventh Street and not one easily forgotten. The comment is indicative despite its derogatory aspect. A painter can usually, or should ideally, be able to project his knowledge and instinct beyond his taste, the last mentioned being surface matter in the business of criticism. It was this gentleman's taste which created the paradox. What the incident evokes is the fact that Lyonel Feininger's work is that of a painter's painter. He always commanded the respect of his fellow artists. That is no easy thing to achieve and there are few accolades better worth having.