Arty Farty Friday ~ Lyonel Feininger

 Lyonel Feininger, left,  and Mark Tobey

Lyonel Feininger (July 17, 1871 – January 13, 1956), German-American painter, born in New York to German-American parents who were both musicians. He set out to study music but found early on that he preferred art, which he studied in Germany and France. His paintings embrace expressionism and cubism.

Feininger began his career as a cartoonist and pioneer of the comic strip. He also composed, played piano and dabbled in photography - in his "spare time". A multi-talented individual!

I wasn't familiar with his name or his work before preparing this post. There's plenty of information on his professional progression online, but hardly anything about his personality and personal life. There might be clues in the book shown, above left. He married twice. His second wife was Jewish, which partly accounted for the couple's emigration to the USA in the 1930s, from Germany where they had settled. The Nazis labelled Feininger's paintings "degenerate" anyway, so he had at least two reasons for leaving the land where it appeared he had felt most at home, had absorbed the trends and culture of that country over several decades, and had become an early member of the famous Bauhaus school of art and architecture.

See also HERE and HERE

Examples of of his paintings:

 Gables I, Lueneberg

Jesuiten III (Jesuits III)

Segelboote (Sailing Boats)

 Time Immemorial

 Umpferstedt I

 Silver Star

Lady in Mauve

Am Strande (On the beach)

Covers from his cartooning days:

Lyonel Feininger's natal chart. Astro.com has his birth data: as 17 July 1871, New York, at 06:08 the time with a "C" rating (source unknown, use with caution).

A quadruple Cancerian : Sun, Moon Uranus and Jupiter - the first 3 of those conjoined. I found nothing about Feininger's personality online, but if his nature shines through his artwork he would appear to have been a mix of light-hearted humour (his cartooning) and a detail oriented guy keen on modernity and experimentation (his cubism-like style involving human figures).

Venus, planet of the arts, lay in precise Virgo, in harmonious trine to Saturn (structure) in its home sign Capricorn, and in helpful sextile to Jupiter (expansion, humour) in Cancer. That, together with avant garde and experimental Uranus conjoining Sun and Moon just about describes his art styles.

Neptune (imagination, creativity, photography) in Aries was in square (challenging) aspect to the more emotionally-charged Cancer cluster, which gives a kind of echo to the more precise, structured Saturn-ish feel of his cubist-related work - he definitely wasn't in the business of painting fluffy, dreamy mystical scenes!

Saturn, lying opposite Jupiter, could be seen to reflect a balance of his two signature styles: humour and structure.