A respected painter, photographer and teacher, Lux pioneered with the camera to compile an invaluable documentation of avant-garde Germany between the wars. He was the youngest son of the modernist painter Lyonel Feininger who was one of the first artists to be appointed by Walter Gropius to teach at the Bauhaus in the Weimar Republic.
The last Original Link To the Bauhaus school, T. Lux Feininger, has died
Lux studied art at the Bauhaus in Dessau and later worked there. He originally studied stage design and was a member of the jazz band at the school. Like his brother Andreas, Feininger turned his interests, to photography but In 1930 he began to paint. studying in Paris in 1935. Feininger was Influenced by the New Vision principles articulated by the Bauhaus teacher Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. He chronicled daily life at the Bauhaus through photographic images that showed a playful, spontaneous spirit and a keen sense of design perspective, using the new developments in modern photography as a medium. With the rise of fascism, in 1936 he emigrated along with his family to New York.
In the fifties he dedicated himself completely to painting and drawing. In his works the influence of the Bauhaus always remained noticeable. Feininger developed his unmistakable style throughout this period. After leaving Germany, he painted some striking self-portraits reminiscent of Otto Dix and began adding locomotives to his repertory of images. Until 1947 he signed his pictures with the alias ” Theodor Lux” and exhibited in New York and Boston. In the early 1960s he began painting in a semi-abstract prismatic style influenced by his father and Kandinsky. Beside painting he was a highly regarded teacher in New York, at Harvard and as head of drawing at the Boston Museum school, from which he retired in 1975. Feininger lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the intellectual suburb, which was home to Harvard . The Harvard Busch-Reisinger Museum organized a retrospective of his work in 1962 which was very well received. In 1998 Germany finally recognized the artist’s cultural value and he attained a wider reputation with a large exhibition at the national gallery, Moritzburg. His Bauhaus photographs were also shown in the exhibition “Dancing on the Roof: Photography and the Bauhaus (1923-1929)” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2001 and to mark his 100th Birthday he was honoured at the arts center Kiel in 2010 with an extensive exhibition.
Feininger was the father of three sons: Lucas, Charles and Conrad Feininger. He died peacefully at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.The death was confirmed by his daughter-in-law Kate Feininger.