EXACT FANTASIST

ALTHOUGH he spent most of his life in Germany, Lyonel Feininger framed and shaped his art in America. The son of a German concert violinist, Feininger was born and brought up in Manhattan. Among his earliest memories was that of seeing stripe-suited prisoners marching in lock step on Blackwells (now Welfare Island. "This made a wretched impression on me." he recalled. "I took to drawing ghosts for a while, and this may have laid the foundation for my fantastic figures and caricatures." When he was 16, Feininger went to Europe to study music. Soon he switched to art and landed a long-distance job with the Chicago Sunday Tribune, drawing two comics of his own invention The Kinder-Kids and Wee Willie Winkle's World. These light-footed and sad-eyed fantasies led to his first serious paintings such as Pink Sky (see color).

Later, while teaching at Walter Gropius' Bauhaus in Germany, another childhood influence returned to shape the major part of Feininger's art: it was his passion for American precision, as expressed in Manhattan's illimitable grid of straight streets, its now-vanished els, old New York Central trains with diamond-shaped smokestack and steam domes of polished brass, and Hudson River sidewheelers and yachts, of which he used to build faithful models. There, working side by side with fellow fantasists, topped by Paul Klee. and fellow precisionists, notably Josef Albers. Feininger evolved the weird, airy, many-faceted style that is his own.

When Hitler closed the Bauhaus in 1933. Feininger at last came home to Manhattan, to sail his model boats on the pond in Central Park as he had as a boy, and to paint in the midst of war the most joyful canvases of his career. The school-of-Paris cubism he brought back with him helped free his individual genius: he took cubism out of doors, to church and to the beach, using it to animate a vista with the intricate counterpoint of a Bach fugue. Regatta, which seems as much like the gates of paradise as Pink Sky is like the gates of hell, is a sparkling example.

Three years ago (at 84) Feininger died. His reputation has since been climbing without him, and will probably keep climbing for some time to come. The Cleveland Museum of Art is now assembling a huge retrospective exhibition of Feininger's life work, which will tour the U.S. and Europe for the next two years.

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