Stiftung Sammlung Ziegler at Kunstmuseum Mülheim an der Ruhr7 March – 20 June 2027

On the occasion of its 25th anniversary, the Stiftung Sammlung Ziegler at Kunstmuseum Mülheim an der Ruhr presents a major retrospective exhibition devoted to the oeuvre of the German-American artist Lyonel Feininger. Featuring approximately 150 paintings, watercolours, graphic prints, and wooden objects drawn from public and private collections, this project marks the first comprehensive survey of the artist’s work in the Ruhr region in over six decades.

Lyonel Feininger (b. 1871 in New York; d. 1956 ibid.) relocated to Germany at the age of sixteen, initially undertaking drawing instruction at the Hamburger Gewerbeschule before attending the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin. In the subsequent years, he operated as a freelance illustrator and caricaturist for various publishing houses, gradually emancipating himself from commercial commissions from 1906 onwards to establish his practice as an independent fine artist.

By the time of his appointment as a Meister (master master-instructor) at the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, Feininger was firmly established among the central figures of German modernism. His Cubist-inflected depictions of the Baltic coastline and the Weimar countryside have since entered the collective visual lexicon, largely mediated through widespread print reproduction.

Considerably less recognized today are the caricatures and comic strips Feininger dispatched across the Atlantic in 1906, which introduced the American-born artist to the readership of the Chicago Sunday Tribune under the moniker "The Famous German Artist." Equally deserving of critical re-evaluation are his fantastical-grotesque figurative compositions and hand-carved wooden toy ensembles, whose expressive form-language presents a compelling counterpoint to the prismatically articulated spatial structures of his architectural paintings.

The exhibition charts Feininger’s stylistic and thematic trajectory: from his early activity as a caricaturist and comic draftsman in Wilhelmine Berlin, through his mastership at the Bauhaus, to his late works produced in American exile. Following the defamation of his art as "degenerate" (entartet) under the National Socialist regime, Feininger was compelled to return to the United States in 1937.

A comprehensive examination of his total oeuvre reveals a persistent engagement with specific motifs invoking a world in dissolution—archaic sailing vessels, figures in Biedermeier attire, locomotives from the American frontier era, labyrinthine alleys, and medieval ecclesiastical architecture. In correspondence with his wife, Feininger acknowledged living in "memory and longing," identifying these psychological states as "the motive force behind all deeper works of art."

Synthesising these complementary developmental trajectories, the exhibition reconstructs Feininger’s cross-period iteration of central motifs while tracing the distinct avenues of formal abstraction whose genesis lay in the figurative drama of his early graphic work.