Exhibit of the week Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World

Whitney Museum of American Art

New York

Through Oct. 16

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To call Lyonel Feininger a “schlock­meister” would be a bit unfair, said Laura Gilbert in the blog Art Unwashed. The New York–born painter (1871–1956) created works of charm and whimsy that only occasionally recall “cheap hotel art.” Yet the Whitney’s weirdly curated retrospective—skewed toward the kitschy—could send Feininger’s already precarious reputation into free fall. The trouble, perhaps, might be that he previously was misperceived because of his impeccable avant-garde résumé: While living in Germany in his 30s, he exhibited with German expressionist groups Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Wassily Kandinsky. Between the wars, he even taught at the edgy Bauhaus art school. But next to the “furious experimentation” of his iconoclastic colleagues, Feininger’s sugary depictions of “choo-choo trains” and “rubbery bodies” look decidedly inconsequential—“essentially illustrations of unwritten fairy tales.”

Funny how we demand utter seriousness from our painters, said John Zeaman in the Bergen County, N.J., Record. Feininger, a onetime comic-strip artist, “took the same liberties with vivid color and primitive form” that Kandinsky and others did; all he lacked was their showy angst. Yet what’s not to like in his kooky depictions of Parisian streets populated by a host of “cartoonish” characters—“the fat man, the midget, the man on stilts”? Feininger twists and stretches and otherwise transforms them into “giants that span the height of the canvas.” In my mind, the 20th century could have used more artists like Feininger, ones who could “blend high art and low art into pictures that were both funny and beautiful.”

Feininger was in fact an artist torn between competing instincts, said Judith H. Dobrzynski in The Wall Street Journal. In his later years, after returning to New York, he omitted figures from his canvases entirely, creating atmospheric urban images intended to depict the deep spiritualism that he saw in the world. Yet the late works “never achieve the greatness of those he made in Europe” during a brief period when his dueling sensibilities aligned brilliantly. Just before and after World War I, in paintings characterized by their cubist-like depictions of refracting light, he played with scale relationships and otherwise distorted reality with marvelous skill. It’s time his native country appreciated him for it.