T. Lux Feininger
| T. Lux Feininger | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 11, 1910 Berlin, Germany |
| Died | July 7, 2011 (aged 101) Cambridge, Massachusetts |
| Spouse(s) | Jeanne (married ????–????; her death) Patricia Randall (married 1954–????) |
| Children | Charles, Conrad, and Lucas |
| Parent(s) | Lyonel Feininger and Julia Berg |
T. Lux Feininger (June 11, 1910 Berlin, Germany – July 7, 2011 Cambridge, Massachusetts) was a German-American painter, avant-garde photographer, author, and art teacher who was born in Berlin to Julia Berg and Lyonel Feininger, an American living in Germany from the age of sixteen. His father was appointed as the Master of the Printing Workingshop at the newly formed Bauhaus art school in Weimar by Walter Gropius in 1919. He had two older full brothers, including Andreas Feininger, and two half sisters, even older, by Clara Fürst and his father (from his first marriage).
At sixteen, Lux Feininger became a student at the Bauhaus at Dessau, where he studied painting with Josef Albers, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky, played in the Bauhauskapelle, the Bauhaus jazz band, and participated in experimental theater. It was here that he began taking photographs and assumed the role of an artistic photojournalist chronicling the daily life at Bauhaus. Although no photographic studio was part of the Bauhaus until 1929, his photography was influenced by the aesthetic of László Moholy-Nagy, who lived adjacent to the Feininger family. Soon Feininger was selling his photographs to periodicals and newspapers through an agency. By 1929 his work was featured in Film und Foto, a survey of modern photography.
A retrospective of his early photography was held in 1962 at the Busch-Reisinger Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in 2001, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in Manhattan, showed his works at an exhibit entitled, Dancing on the Roof: Photography and the Bauhaus (1923-1929).
In 1929 he also began to exhibit his paintings under a pseudonym, Theodore Lux, by which his stated intention was to avoid preferential treatment arising from the fame of his father. These are his first and second given names without his family name, he had never used his first name prior to this time. His initial paintings included maritime subjects, frequently of old sailing ships. From 1930 to 1935 he spent time in Paris. In 1936 Feininger left Germany and settled in the United States. His family had been targeted by the Nazis as undesirable foreigners participating in "decadent" cultural activities and they, along with many Bauhaus artists and designers, emigrated. The majority of the negatives for his collection of photographs had been left behind during his departure from Germany and none of these have been recovered.
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