Comic Cosmic

Lyonel Feininger is so well known for his prismatic paintings of land, sea and city scenes that his earlier career as a major caricaturist is all but forgotten. Though born in the U.S. and always a U.S. citizen, he went to Berlin in 1894, started working for German newspapers, made himself Germany's foremost cartoonist. He had a gift for whimsy and fantasy that stayed with him right up to 1956, when he died at 84. The gift is charmingly displayed in a new show called "The Intimate World of Lyonel Feininger," at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.

Most of the exhibit's watercolors, drawings, prints and toys still belong to Feininger's widow Julia, and his sons, Painter Lux, Photographer Andreas and Laurence, a priest. The museum's print curator, William Lieberman, persuaded the family to let them be shown for the first time. The most surprising works are the colored comics pages done in Germany for the Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1906. For the first cartoon, Feininger drew a caricature of himself holding his cast of characters by strings like marionettes. He called himself "Uncle Feininger," and his cast included the Kin-der-Kids and the appealing Wee Willie Winkie, who thought that every object in the world--trees, trains, puddles and clouds--had faces and feelings just like people.

According to his biographer, Hans Hess, Feininger even as a child could find "mysteries in the recesses of buildings and strange figures walking on the roofs and in the streets." He recorded these in a series of sketches of scrawled little figures doing every sort of everyday act from walking in the rain to gazing at a rainbow. Feininger also saw mystery in the machine, but his machines tended to come either from the past or from way off in the future. His nostalgic Old Locomotive is almost like a person--a gallant, superannuated old gentleman that keeps chugging along out of sheer determination and stubborn pride.

At first sight, all this seems far removed from Feininger's great work, his architectural paintings, in which subtly shaded planes of color seem to reach back into endless space. But even in the little wooden sculptures that he gave away to friends, there is the sense that only through distortion can one see reality, and that since reality changes constantly, distortion of some sort must imply that change. The comic and the cosmic artist were not so far apart, and Feininger the painter was always grateful to Feininger the cartoonist. "Far be it from me," he said, "to underrate those important years as a comics draftsman. They were my only discipline."

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