Bach in Prisms

When he is asked what artist has influenced him most, Painter Lyonel Feininger answers: "Bach." Visitors to his retrospective show in Manhattan last week could see what he means. Disciplined as fugues, Feininger's paintings of ships and steeples, trees and towers are masterpieces of order--"organized and orchestrated in color," Feininger hopes, "like a large-scale composition for the organ." Over the years, his compositions have won Lyonel Feininger recognition as one of the most distinguished of living U.S. artists, and last week, at 80, he was still composing as strongly as ever.

Permanent Drift. Born in Manhattan, Feininger started out to be a musician. His father was a violinist, his mother a pianist and Lyonel eventually became both. He was a shy and lonely boy who practiced four or five hours a day, then listened for hours more to his parents' performances. When he was 16, his father decided that he should continue his studies in Leipzig. But the professor his father wanted him to have was away. While waiting in Hamburg for his return, Lyonel drifted into studying art.

The drift soon became permanent. Lyonel became a caricaturist, and though still living in Europe, he began drawing comic strips for the Chicago Tribune. He soon learned to hate deadlines, found that what he really wanted was to paint ("My contentment is founded on creative work"). He joined the Bauhaus group, and with Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky (TIME, March 24) became a top apostle of abstract art. "I have to destroy nature," he cried, "before I can build her up again." The architect he took as his model: Johann Sebastian Bach.

New Design. To Feininger, each object he chose to paint--a ship gliding through the fog, a cathedral town or a Manhattan skyscraper--was nothing more than a theme. It was the space around it that gave it life and provided the harmony.

As if holding a prism to his eye, he would first shatter the space, then load its fragments with color and re-order them into a design. "A boat moving in the atmosphere," says he, "sets up stresses and movements in the air. That is what I visualize, and the pattern and organization of those stresses."

Today, erect as a Junker, Lyonel Feininger is still absorbed by the stresses of the ghostly world he creates, where shadow and substance play upon each other in a sort of counterpoint. Each day, after helping his wife tidy up their Manhattan apartment, he disappears into his studio. Sometimes he comes out to strum a bit on the piano, then returns to paint again and grumble about the light.

Though he paints and grumbles less explosively now, his object is the same. "The whole world," says he, "is nothing but order."

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